by N X Hunter
Kitsuna had some reservations about trying to shoot her way out of the belly of the beast. The thing was likely underwater, and that meant that logically, any holes she made in it would be letting water in. Even so, there was little else to try. She had walked the full perimeter of the area she was inside, and there didn't seem to be a way out, even anything that looked like the esophagus, or whatever she had presumably come in through in that bizarre moment when darkness had closed around her. She couldn't remember how it had felt, it was almost as though she'd been teleported here from the mouth.
Well, platinum gun, I guess we just have to try and make a hole big enough and swim out, or something. I don't know how long I've been in here, but it will have been more than a minute. I've got to get out or Soren will never find me. Fuck, I was so close to the core, too. Even if he finds it, it was too high to jump to, even for me, I think, so he won't be able to destroy it with a sword. It needs this gun. Fuck, I hope this works.
With the assault rifle aimed at no particular target, she found it was harder to be precise about where she hit. Since she didn't really care about shooting a specific point on the wall of the whale's body, unlike when she was shooting at a smaller monster, she found she had to manually aim the gun instead of it being a pretty much instinctive thing. Even so, she tried to fire out bullets in a rough circle, as if to cut a hole into the wall with them. After a good few seconds of constant fire, she stopped, and made her way through the pink smoke to take a look at her handiwork.
Water was squirting in through tiny holes in high pressure jets, but the bullet holes were far too small to have created any weakness in the structure of the wall of fleshy red matter. She bashed the portion inside the circle of holes with the butt of her gun and all of her strength, but it felt like thick, sturdy rubber. There was no way those little holes would be enough for her to create a gap she could get out of, and as she saw the water jetting in, she realized it would be hard to get out of a gap in the flesh anyway, with the sea trying to rush in against her.
Fuck. Well, I could keep trying to make a hole - with enough bullets it would have to work eventually, and I can't run out of ammo. But if it takes too long, and with every hole letting in more water, I could drown before I managed it. And even if I can't drown, my gun might not work underwater, so I need to try and avoid letting this chamber or whatever it is get flooded before I've got a way out. There has to be something else I can try... Maybe it has a weak spot somewhere. Maybe even a core of its own. If I kill it, presumably it will just vanish into smoke or mist like the other monsters I've seen, and so I'd be left in the water - hopefully able to swim back and get up to the platforms again somehow, or at least able to signal to Soren where I am. That's it, I have to find a way to destroy it from the inside.
But what could have been a whole day passed, with her wandering the cavern, inspecting every bump and bone, shooting anything that looked remotely different from its surroundings and gaining only more bead-sized holes, and more water. It was up to her waist now, the end of her hair wet with it, though at least the salt water seemed to be diluting whatever the liquids that had been in here before she started shooting were - acids and enzymes, probably, if this were really her imagining of a gargantuan stomach.
Her frustration caused tears to stream down her face, and more than a few times, she'd unleashed the full energy of her transformation and punched and kicked the walls with all of her considerable might, but any impact just made her bounce away in an unsatisfying manner. She'd been working at this creature with all the power of a superhuman body and unlimited bullets, and yet all it had achieved were leaks. She felt bored of the place, of the task of trying to find something different in an enormous wall of muscle and bone, of being confined with this dim light, and this heat, and this thick, sickening air. Her body didn't need to rest but her spirit was breaking.
More pacing, her body now mostly submerged. The water would reach her neck soon, but there was still space up above her. She'd have to swim in it, and keep her head up where the air was.
But then what? How had it come to this? Her thoughts had long since lost their structure, the isolation, the maddening redness, the barely suppressed panic that there may be no way out. Who was to blame? Parker Klein. Parker Klein had caused them to go on strike. If he hadn't, she'd have entered this domain with Rayna and Courtney, and no doubt they'd have found the core quickly between them, and she'd have destroyed it with her gun. The way things should have been played out almost as a vision in her mind.
This could be the end of everything. Her life, almost certainly. Reality itself, if the fact she and Soren had failed here meant the creatures could get through to the real world. Maybe it would have happened anyway, in some other way, if it hadn't been Parker, and Courtney, and her. Maybe something else would have caused some mahou shoujo somewhere to fail, and the creatures would have had their day. No, this way was better. At least she would meet the end having done her best. At least she'd die knowing who she really was, and having met those people. But would Parker die knowing that he'd caused this? And if so, was that too horrible a punishment even for him?
Though Parker was to blame before that, even, wasn't he? If he had never meddled in Courtney and Jacinta's lives, Jacinta wouldn't have needed to be replaced. Kitsuna wouldn't have transformed until somebody retired. She wouldn't be here now. She'd still be living her fake life. Maybe if they hadn't known she would transform at any time, the Academy would have let her be accepted at a real, normal college, and begin her course, only stepping in when Rayna or one of the others retired and she eventually transformed. She saw images of herself on some leafy green campus, flirting with some man. Laughing with a girl. Taking earnest notes as she listened to a professor. But their faces were a blur.
No, those weren't the right people. If she had had that life, the life that Parker took away from her, she would still be condemned to becoming a mahou shoujo, she'd just have been ignorant for longer. And didn't she already resent how long she'd been kept in the dark? Soren, Rayna, James. They weren't the stock photo college people that were so fake, her addled mind couldn't even hallucinate them properly. They were real, and they cared about her. But it wasn’t going to be enough, was it?
She realized her feet had left the bottom of the whale's belly, and she was floating now on her back, looking up at only red as her mind meandered. The slow heartbeat that had pounded since she'd been swallowed sounded even louder when her ears were under the surface. But where was it, the heart of this thing? Nowhere she could reach from here. She'd seen every inch of this place, and blown holes in many of those inches, and no organs, no cores, nothing that could kill it had shown themselves. It was time to face it. There was no way out, and what was left was only to wonder what happened if she drowned.
Just how much can I heal?
The fact that that thought was clearer than the rest told her it was important, important to the situation she was in, the last situation she'd ever be in.
Indeed, if she couldn't die from drowning, would she just stay here, alive and awake, in the whale's belly forever? Whether or not she could drown was something she still hadn't been brave enough to test, though it would be easy now just to let her face fall under the surface and... see what happened. What was stopping her more, now, was not fear of how it felt to drown, but fear of how it would feel to learn that she actually couldn't.
Maybe... the gun?
Yes, that was a possibility. If she didn't need air to live, maybe she could end her suffering with the platinum gun. Perhaps it could damage her brain, or her heart, too quickly for her healing factor to do anything about it.
Yes. I'll just rest a while here. The water will keep rising, and in the end, I'll make the choice. There's no point in being afraid of it now. I'll just drift until it comes. And then I'll shoot myself.
Her eyes closed, and she tried to remember nicer times. The voices of her friends. Her mom, even.
"Kitsuna. Kitsuna, you have t
o wake up!"
"No, mom. There's no need for me to go to school now. Not anymore," she murmured, a hot, fat tear slipping from the corner of one closed eye and streaking down to join the rest of the salty water.
"Mom? Don't be ridiculous. Listen, you have to snap out of it! You're getting too close!" came the reply in her head.
Suddenly, everything in the darkness behind her eyelids snapped into focus.
She was still in the whale, her senses told her that, but her consciousness was somewhere else now. A black empty space where she was standing on nothing, dry now, in her fully transformed state - no, a better one even - she could somehow tell by the gloves she could see when she raised her hands in front of her eyes. The gun was still in her hand. It hadn't changed.
"Come on, it can't be bad enough that you're thinking about coming here, can it?" said a young, female voice from behind her.
She spun around, somehow already knowing what she was about to see.
The true form of Illaria of the Void.
Chapter 28
The mahou shoujo form standing in front of Kitsuna was more impressive even than Rayna's, though, naturally, the legendary Gold Violet Illaria would be, if power was what determined how elaborate their appearances became.
There was no light here, but she seemed to have her own, just as Kitsuna herself did. It was almost as if they had both been cut-and-pasted from a brightly lit room onto a thoroughly empty black background.
Her hair was a light gold, with violet lengths that blended in from around her shoulders, all the way to the ground, merging through different shades from pastel to a rich, saturated purple at the very ends. Her eyes too, were violet, both the irises and the perfect make-up around them. She wore a dress of fairytale frills and lace, in opulent shades of her gold and violet motif, and golden jewelry with glowing purple jewels adorned her neck, wrists, ears and forehead. She looked like a little girl's dream of what a magical princess would look like, all pretty colors and fantasy. A doll.
And yet, she was the spirit of someone who had met a horrible end long in the past, as far as Kitsuna knew, and so it was disturbing to see her, so real and majestic, knowing that.
"Is this the Void?" she asked, dreading the answer.
"It may as well be. It looks the same. But it isn't, because in the Void, we don't see or hear each other. No, you were edging close, that's what reached out to me. I can't go into storm domains, and you can't go into the Void, but the two are joined together, we know that. And here, it seems you reached the intersection, and I was able to come to you."
"I was close to the Void? How? Wait, was I dying? I don't really know what was going to happen to me in there..."
"What is going to happen to you, you mean. You're still there. This, this suburb of the Void or whatever it is, it's not where your body is. I couldn't see what was happening to you, but I can guess by the fact that you and I are here, that you found yourself in an unwinnable situation, where your spirit was giving up... Perhaps you were thinking of using that on yourself? I'm right, aren't I?" Illaria accused, indicating Kitsuna's gun with a regal wave of her gloved hand.
Kitsuna knew her face had given her away, and so there was no need to confirm it with words.
"Well, that is how you end up in the Void. For all eternity."
"Suicide?"
"Giving up. The physical suicide thing, well, that is usually where one's mind goes when they're trapped in an unbeatable situation and they can't die the normal way, but it's not just trying to kill yourself that sends you there. A heroic sacrifice, for instance, done by some crazy person to save a friend, that won't do it, normally. That which is done with a purpose, with hope, is not the same thing. It's falling into despair that condemns you to the Void. Accepting that you aren't going to fight anymore, that nobody cares enough to save you, and that the whole world is lost anyway. When that happens to a mahou shoujo in a storm domain, this is her death."
"So... you died that way?"
Kitsuna was willing to believe what she'd heard, but she still couldn't think of anything else to do. If Illaria was just here to guide her into a blank eternity, then she wanted to prolong this time, to hear her story, to have something to distract her from letting this fresh new horror become her reality.
"Actually, I did not. I was far stronger than that. No, I used my magic, magic that I fear has left your world now, and made a bargain of sorts with the Void. That I would endure it in place of another."
"You traded your future for someone who should have died? To spend eternity here?"
Kitsuna knew now why nobody had wanted to tell her Illaria's tale, or even think about it too much. Who had she loved so much that she had chosen this, to spare them from it?
"Yes. My little sister. She became a mahou shoujo when I was already at the peak of my power, and I think she was ashamed at her weakness, and afraid of everything. It was only her third fight. She was overwhelmed, much as you were in your first storm domain, but unlike your team in that situation, my other team mate and I were also inundated with adversaries. It was taking us a long time to find the core, and so I went to search for my sister instead, leaving the other girl to seek it out alone. But what I found was not my sister anymore, but an empty shell of a person, being fed upon by beasts and regenerating endlessly, but with nothing of her spirit left inside. There would have been no saving her, not even for one as powerful and adept at old magic as me. It was ridiculous of her. Though the fight was tough, we were never going to lose it, the world wasn't going to end. She shouldn't have given up."
"So, you took her fate instead of her? You must have loved her so much, how could she not have been the most powerful mahou shoujo in the world with love like that on her side?" Kitsuna asked, tears welling in her eyes as she imagined a distraught Illaria cradling the body of her stricken sister.
"I would like to say it was as noble as that, but in truth, it was just as much hubris on my part as anything admirable. You see, I thought I was so strong, so good at using magic, that I would be able to not only take her place in the Void, but also come back from it myself. I thought I could beat the system, as it were. Well, I was partially successful, I suppose, if you count being able to inhabit bugs and things for a brief spell each day as success..."
She sounded bitter.
"I'm so sorry it didn't work..." Kitsuna said, uncomfortable and at a loss for any other words.
"Well, the part that saved my sister did. She never set the world on fire, but she had a fairly adequate period as a mahou shoujo, had two sons, lived as normal a life as a magical girl could in those days, and then died of pneumonia. I suppose she had some happy moments and those made it worthwhile... Maybe in some people's eyes. I don't know. But my decision was my own, and if it wasn't a net gain for the world to have her defending it instead of me, at least it was a gain for her..."
She sounded unconvinced. She'd had a very long time with nothing else to think about. It wasn't normal for people who made sacrifices for others' lives, even in stories, to then get to see how the lives they saved played out. Maybe one would resent an eternity like this if all it had bought was one average life. Or maybe if one loved that person, their happiness was worth it all, even if they never did anything as remarkable as you had planned to do. Faced with the Void herself, Kitsuna found it easier to sympathize with Illaria's truth, rather than judge her for questioning these things.
"I suppose you're telling me this because you think I've ended up in a situation like that again. That I just need a pep talk to keep my sanity in check until Rayna or Courtney can save me. Well, I wish it were that simple, but... no, this is the real thing, the real, end of the world bullshit scenario. Believe me, if I could win, or if we had any other hope, I wouldn't be falling to despair again - I've learned so much since that first storm. But there's nothing...."
Kitsuna explained to a wide eyed, suitably shocked Illaria all of the developments that lead to her being alone inside a flooding whale, with Rayna
and Courtney outside in the real world, and Soren, now some kind of magical knight, unsure of his abilities and unequipped to destroy the core.
"OK, so I guess I can see why you fell to despair. I underestimated you, I confess. You are, after all, a metal type, so of course you wouldn't fall to something trivial. At least, now it's not your first time, no offense meant... But Kitsuna, everything is at stake. Everyone you know. Soren is probably terrified, but he's not touching the Void. He's out there fighting to try and save you. You have more within yourself."
"Look, I feel guilty enough as it is, and I don't want to end up in the fucking Void, or have the world end, of course I fucking don't. But there's nothing left to try! I got swallowed by something I can't shoot my way out of with my gun, which I can't find any weak points in, and which my experiments have caused to be rapidly filling up with sea water. What the fuck is left to try? What would you do?" Kitsuna raged in frustration.
But Illaria was unshaken by Kitsuna's emotions. She spoke calmly, and thoughtfully.
"Your gun is special. I didn't know what it would be when we made your wand, but I knew it was going to be something exceptional even then. This is far from its only form. I feel like, by arming you with a gun, the world has armed you with its own human ingenuity. It's not just a thing like a sword or spear, a thing that can get bigger or sharper, but never really diversify from its original form. It's an invention. A piece of magic that draws on human feats of engineering. Now, I have seen many things with the eyes of creatures from the normal world over the years, and so I have some ideas about what the potential of that weapon might be. What machines humans have invented to wage their wars with. You, having lived wholly in that world in modern times, will have an even better knowledge of them, I’m sure. In short, you may not be able to kill the creature that swallowed you, or form a way out with tiny bullets, but perhaps...."