Neo Chronicles
Episode 26: Burn it to the Ground
Table of Contents
Noah just passed out. That idiot.
I was tryna tell him to cut back on the ice show, but he wasn't listening. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I tell Iara to cover us as I a pull up his lifeless body from the snowy grave he made for himself. The dude knows he can't be doin' this kinda ish. Still think it's incredibly stupid that the ice man doesn't have ice resistance. That's the first thing I picked up on when I got my ST. Heat, cold, don't matter the temperature, it just don't get to me. I guess I was lucky that both my parents were there to help me with it, but still—common sense shoulda told him—
Whatever though. He's got a lot to work through when he comes to. Right now, I gotta get him outta this. Find cover—some sorta shelter. Shoot, that's gonna be impossible. There're demons everywhere. You can't tell them apart from the buildings anymore. It's like they're on and in everything.
A car comes speeding our way. There's no one driving it, but it's headed straight for us. I shoot a fire stream in its direction, but that doesn't stop it. With Noah being carried on my shoulder, I can't move as freely as I like, so I stay put and shoot another blast at it, this one a lot more intense. The care explodes, but when it does, this black goopy lookin' somethin' comes flingin' out at us like a flicked booger. I shoot at it, but it doesn't stop either.
Without thinking, I toss Noah to the ground and point both my hands at the thing. The flames shooting from them make it explode, but I know it's only a matter of time before comes back together again.
Noah wakes up. He sits up right on the ground, holding his head. Asks me if we're dead yet.
“No, we're not,” I answer.
“Oh, well that's good.” He looks up at the top of the building to see whatever light show Lynn's putting on up there. We're supposed to be biding time for her to come in all Deus Ex or whatever. “Well, guess we still got work to do.”
“Are you good?”
“Not really, but I'll deal.”
“Whatever.”
I don't know if he was looking for me to help him out. I asked, and he said no, so it's not my problem. If he dies, then that'd be dumb. It'd be kinda sad, but it's everyone for themselves right now. S'jus how it is.
In spite of that, I stick next to him. Fighting in pairs is a lot better than fighting alone. He takes one huge blob of shadow looking monsters; I take another. Every so often, I check over my shoulder to see if he's still standing. He is, and he's still bombarding his group with whatever snow storm he can conjures up.
I'm scorching the ground in front of me. The idea is to make it so only a few bum rush me at a time, but nobody wants ta play fair like that. They, as a group, charge through the flames. I get mad and turn up the heat. The flames shoot up high in the sky. So what do they do? They decide to fly over it!
All of them—one by one, two by two, three by three, it don't matter—come dive bombin'. Ugly lookin' gargoyle rejects. Black as I'll get out. I'm shootin' 'em up though. Yeah, it's all I can do to keep my head.
One manages to get too close, though. It comes in from the sky and punches the ground in front of me. That woulda been me crushed in that crater right there, but I had the sense to jump out the way. After I land on my back, I shoot the thing with a fire blast.
Two more come at me on both sides. I roll to my feet and blast them down, too.
Now they're tryna get fancy and dog pile me. Them coming together all at once. It looks like a huge, black sheet tryna cover me. I got a million things rushing to my head right now: panic, worry, fear—they all fall in line with those things. It looks like I'm about to drown.
Now I'm surrounded by fire. I'm in a dome of my own making—I'm doing this. None of the darkness is seeping through. It's too hot for that, too bright for that. I don't let anything break in.
And that's how I stay—wrapped up in a ball of flames.
I stay put. I don't know what's going on the other side. No, not true. I know they're trying to break their way in—tryna snuff me out. All I can think about is how much I hate everyone for puttin' me in this mess. All of 'em: Noah for stealin' my girl, Chris for being an idiot, Lynn for actin' stupid.
Dang it, one of 'em broke through. A black whip like thing pries its way through the dome and slashes me across the chest. Deep gash, too. I'm bleeding. The walls start closing in. My dome gets smaller—the pain's so great, I almost end up droppin' the field altogether.
Dang it. I've never felt anything like this before. It's so cold that it burns. A few more whips—tentacles with claws, really—manage to get through and slice at my back. That same pain, just a thousand times worse. Now they're slashing my arms, my legs—everything all over!
I gotta get 'em off me. I gotta—my God, why in the world are we here? I hate you! I hate all of you. We make it out alive, I got a mind to kill you myself. Would you like that? Ya'll obviously got a death wish!
The fire dome gets bigger. I keep pushing against them more and more, all the while thinking about how much everything sucks. I'm mad. I'm really mad. If the fires weren't a dead giveaway, I'm tellin' you right now; I'm pissed.
It takes all the will power I got. I practically set off a mini nova around me with how big the explosion is, but I manage to blast the freaks off me. I'm on fire—more so than usual. Flames are shooting off me every which way. I do my best to control them, but aside from not burning off my clothes, everything else gets lit. I don't even care, though. I want everything to burn.
As if on queue, every single demon that I thought I exploded comes together like silly putty an' rises to their feet. Not a scratch. Well, bring 'em on! I ain't scurr'd! You hear me, freaks? No? Well do you hear this? I'm shooting fire streams so hot they're burning orange instead of red, so big that they're covering small buildings, so wild that they spread throughout the streets.
I see the demons reel. I know I'm hurting them. Lynn's spell makes it so we can get their attention, but I know I'm the one who's really doin' the damage here. And they know it too. I don't let up. I can't let up.
What's that at my foot? Somethin' seepin' through from a rock. Black, tangly, tentacley—those demons crawlin' through the ground now? Get it off!
It tries to wrap around my foot. I shoot it on instinct. That was the distraction they needed. I feel another cool, sharp, burning sensation on my back. I try to turn around and back hand the fiend, but it disappears in a puff of smog. Right about now I figure that the best thing to do is let go of everything and burn this whole city to the ground. I'm so tempted to do it, too.
I somehow get separated from the others. The demons are quick to surround me. They stand like people now. No faces, no real stable body or anything, but people is the closest thing to relate them to, and there's dozens of them, and they're all running at me.
I shoot at least ten of them in front of me with one blast. Ten from behind with another. Then some more rise from the ground. I shoot them down, too. I'm shooting as many as I can. The thought of tiring myself out like Noah did crosses my mind, but I'm still too mad to sit down. I'm too mad to think of anything, really.
And out of no where that anger turns to fear. The last batch of demons I put down gets up again. Then I see a quick flash of my house on fire. My house. For a moment I think it was me who did it, but I come back and realize that I'm here and my house is a whole ocean away. I blast another group of demons, and then I see my mom lying on the ground charred to a crisp. Then my dad. Then my sister. What's going on?
Stay here. Come on, stay here. I pause for a bit. Hold my head, gather my thoughts, and then get right back to shooting. Then I smell something. The only thing I should be smelling is the ground, some cars, and rocks burning, but that's not it at all. I smell something bad, something putrid. It makes me wanna throw up. It's distracting. At first it's distracting, then it's obnoxious. Like a dead animal. Multiple animals. A skunk? Sick to my stomach. I'm getting dizzy. The smell goes beyond all that. I can't even think of anything to describe it. It keeps getting worse and worse.
The world is spinning. No, now it's flashing. Now spinning again. I hear something loud. It's a heavy booming sound. A sound I can feel. Thunder? Close by? Now, I'm on a cliff in a valley somewhere. No buildings. No cars. No people or signs of any life. The sky is black. Is it night time? No. No? Maybe? Where am I? Everything's black. No, now I'm seeing red—or purplish red.
I hear something move, and my first instinct is to shoot it, so I do. Turns out, I just shot my dad. He looks—my God, did I just kill him? Did I—this doesn't make any sense. What's going on? Something big falls from the sky. It hits me like a wave. My skin's getting eaten up. A thousand tiny things biting me all over. They feel like cold and hot at the same time. I can't do anything to stop them. I can't even see them. I can't breathe. Too dark to see, it feels like I'm tied up and can't move. I'm suffocating.
It feels like—my God, is this what Hell feels like?
No, Hell wouldn't have that big ol' light shining through in the sky. It's the sun. Sun doesn't rise in Hell.
Sun also doesn't get bigger and bigger and bigger like that, either. It's coming straight for me. Do I panic? I should panic, I can't move. I can't fight, but that's okay right now. For some reason, as it gets closer and closer, the pain gets lighter and lighter. The smell sorta dies off, too. It's like—I don't know.
I find myself back in the city—back where I was before. The demons I was fighting are all gone, and there's this short Asian man standing next to me offering his hand. Chris is floating behind him saying something. I'm still too zoned out to make out what, though, but I take the Asian guy's hand and when I do, it's like every negative feeling I had, from the pain to the fear to the rage all goes away. My fire dims out, too.
I look to Chris and notice that somehow he's still alive, and that he's floating.
“When'd you get AntiGravs?” I ask.
Episode 26: Burn it to the Ground
Table of Contents
Noah just passed out. That idiot.
I was tryna tell him to cut back on the ice show, but he wasn't listening. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I tell Iara to cover us as I a pull up his lifeless body from the snowy grave he made for himself. The dude knows he can't be doin' this kinda ish. Still think it's incredibly stupid that the ice man doesn't have ice resistance. That's the first thing I picked up on when I got my ST. Heat, cold, don't matter the temperature, it just don't get to me. I guess I was lucky that both my parents were there to help me with it, but still—common sense shoulda told him—
Whatever though. He's got a lot to work through when he comes to. Right now, I gotta get him outta this. Find cover—some sorta shelter. Shoot, that's gonna be impossible. There're demons everywhere. You can't tell them apart from the buildings anymore. It's like they're on and in everything.
A car comes speeding our way. There's no one driving it, but it's headed straight for us. I shoot a fire stream in its direction, but that doesn't stop it. With Noah being carried on my shoulder, I can't move as freely as I like, so I stay put and shoot another blast at it, this one a lot more intense. The care explodes, but when it does, this black goopy lookin' somethin' comes flingin' out at us like a flicked booger. I shoot at it, but it doesn't stop either.
Without thinking, I toss Noah to the ground and point both my hands at the thing. The flames shooting from them make it explode, but I know it's only a matter of time before comes back together again.
Noah wakes up. He sits up right on the ground, holding his head. Asks me if we're dead yet.
“No, we're not,” I answer.
“Oh, well that's good.” He looks up at the top of the building to see whatever light show Lynn's putting on up there. We're supposed to be biding time for her to come in all Deus Ex or whatever. “Well, guess we still got work to do.”
“Are you good?”
“Not really, but I'll deal.”
“Whatever.”
I don't know if he was looking for me to help him out. I asked, and he said no, so it's not my problem. If he dies, then that'd be dumb. It'd be kinda sad, but it's everyone for themselves right now. S'jus how it is.
In spite of that, I stick next to him. Fighting in pairs is a lot better than fighting alone. He takes one huge blob of shadow looking monsters; I take another. Every so often, I check over my shoulder to see if he's still standing. He is, and he's still bombarding his group with whatever snow storm he can conjures up.
I'm scorching the ground in front of me. The idea is to make it so only a few bum rush me at a time, but nobody wants ta play fair like that. They, as a group, charge through the flames. I get mad and turn up the heat. The flames shoot up high in the sky. So what do they do? They decide to fly over it!
All of them—one by one, two by two, three by three, it don't matter—come dive bombin'. Ugly lookin' gargoyle rejects. Black as I'll get out. I'm shootin' 'em up though. Yeah, it's all I can do to keep my head.
One manages to get too close, though. It comes in from the sky and punches the ground in front of me. That woulda been me crushed in that crater right there, but I had the sense to jump out the way. After I land on my back, I shoot the thing with a fire blast.
Two more come at me on both sides. I roll to my feet and blast them down, too.
Now they're tryna get fancy and dog pile me. Them coming together all at once. It looks like a huge, black sheet tryna cover me. I got a million things rushing to my head right now: panic, worry, fear—they all fall in line with those things. It looks like I'm about to drown.
Now I'm surrounded by fire. I'm in a dome of my own making—I'm doing this. None of the darkness is seeping through. It's too hot for that, too bright for that. I don't let anything break in.
And that's how I stay—wrapped up in a ball of flames.
I stay put. I don't know what's going on the other side. No, not true. I know they're trying to break their way in—tryna snuff me out. All I can think about is how much I hate everyone for puttin' me in this mess. All of 'em: Noah for stealin' my girl, Chris for being an idiot, Lynn for actin' stupid.
Dang it, one of 'em broke through. A black whip like thing pries its way through the dome and slashes me across the chest. Deep gash, too. I'm bleeding. The walls start closing in. My dome gets smaller—the pain's so great, I almost end up droppin' the field altogether.
Dang it. I've never felt anything like this before. It's so cold that it burns. A few more whips—tentacles with claws, really—manage to get through and slice at my back. That same pain, just a thousand times worse. Now they're slashing my arms, my legs—everything all over!
I gotta get 'em off me. I gotta—my God, why in the world are we here? I hate you! I hate all of you. We make it out alive, I got a mind to kill you myself. Would you like that? Ya'll obviously got a death wish!
The fire dome gets bigger. I keep pushing against them more and more, all the while thinking about how much everything sucks. I'm mad. I'm really mad. If the fires weren't a dead giveaway, I'm tellin' you right now; I'm pissed.
It takes all the will power I got. I practically set off a mini nova around me with how big the explosion is, but I manage to blast the freaks off me. I'm on fire—more so than usual. Flames are shooting off me every which way. I do my best to control them, but aside from not burning off my clothes, everything else gets lit. I don't even care, though. I want everything to burn.
As if on queue, every single demon that I thought I exploded comes together like silly putty an' rises to their feet. Not a scratch. Well, bring 'em on! I ain't scurr'd! You hear me, freaks? No? Well do you hear this? I'm shooting fire streams so hot they're burning orange instead of red, so big that they're covering small buildings, so wild that they spread throughout the streets.
I see the demons reel. I know I'm hurting them. Lynn's spell makes it so we can get their attention, but I know I'm the one who's really doin' the damage here. And they know it too. I don't let up. I can't let up.
What's that at my foot? Somethin' seepin' through from a rock. Black, tangly, tentacley—those demons crawlin' through the ground now? Get it off!
It tries to wrap around my foot. I shoot it on instinct. That was the distraction they needed. I feel another cool, sharp, burning sensation on my back. I try to turn around and back hand the fiend, but it disappears in a puff of smog. Right about now I figure that the best thing to do is let go of everything and burn this whole city to the ground. I'm so tempted to do it, too.
I somehow get separated from the others. The demons are quick to surround me. They stand like people now. No faces, no real stable body or anything, but people is the closest thing to relate them to, and there's dozens of them, and they're all running at me.
I shoot at least ten of them in front of me with one blast. Ten from behind with another. Then some more rise from the ground. I shoot them down, too. I'm shooting as many as I can. The thought of tiring myself out like Noah did crosses my mind, but I'm still too mad to sit down. I'm too mad to think of anything, really.
And out of no where that anger turns to fear. The last batch of demons I put down gets up again. Then I see a quick flash of my house on fire. My house. For a moment I think it was me who did it, but I come back and realize that I'm here and my house is a whole ocean away. I blast another group of demons, and then I see my mom lying on the ground charred to a crisp. Then my dad. Then my sister. What's going on?
Stay here. Come on, stay here. I pause for a bit. Hold my head, gather my thoughts, and then get right back to shooting. Then I smell something. The only thing I should be smelling is the ground, some cars, and rocks burning, but that's not it at all. I smell something bad, something putrid. It makes me wanna throw up. It's distracting. At first it's distracting, then it's obnoxious. Like a dead animal. Multiple animals. A skunk? Sick to my stomach. I'm getting dizzy. The smell goes beyond all that. I can't even think of anything to describe it. It keeps getting worse and worse.
The world is spinning. No, now it's flashing. Now spinning again. I hear something loud. It's a heavy booming sound. A sound I can feel. Thunder? Close by? Now, I'm on a cliff in a valley somewhere. No buildings. No cars. No people or signs of any life. The sky is black. Is it night time? No. No? Maybe? Where am I? Everything's black. No, now I'm seeing red—or purplish red.
I hear something move, and my first instinct is to shoot it, so I do. Turns out, I just shot my dad. He looks—my God, did I just kill him? Did I—this doesn't make any sense. What's going on? Something big falls from the sky. It hits me like a wave. My skin's getting eaten up. A thousand tiny things biting me all over. They feel like cold and hot at the same time. I can't do anything to stop them. I can't even see them. I can't breathe. Too dark to see, it feels like I'm tied up and can't move. I'm suffocating.
It feels like—my God, is this what Hell feels like?
No, Hell wouldn't have that big ol' light shining through in the sky. It's the sun. Sun doesn't rise in Hell.
Sun also doesn't get bigger and bigger and bigger like that, either. It's coming straight for me. Do I panic? I should panic, I can't move. I can't fight, but that's okay right now. For some reason, as it gets closer and closer, the pain gets lighter and lighter. The smell sorta dies off, too. It's like—I don't know.
I find myself back in the city—back where I was before. The demons I was fighting are all gone, and there's this short Asian man standing next to me offering his hand. Chris is floating behind him saying something. I'm still too zoned out to make out what, though, but I take the Asian guy's hand and when I do, it's like every negative feeling I had, from the pain to the fear to the rage all goes away. My fire dims out, too.
I look to Chris and notice that somehow he's still alive, and that he's floating.
“When'd you get AntiGravs?” I ask.
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