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 Posted: Wed Mar 30, 2011 3:17 pm
It was like dying, except somehow worse. Somehow infinitely more gruesome. It was bloody and terrible and yet Tanzanite couldn't have looked away even had Nemesis' fist not been coiled in her hair. She watched herself screaming as though she stood outside of her own body, saw the blood and guts and bile spill out of her own stomach, watched as the yellow stomach acid poured out over Nemesis' glowing hand.
Hell, she could feel it. She could feel the warmth of her own entrails as they spilled out over her legs and slopped onto the floor with a wet smack. She could feel the slick and slimy guts as they spilled out of her, looking nothing like one would expect them to from biology books. They were not red and pink and salmon-colored, but grey and black and oozing. Some of them looked vaguely human, others certainly not. Her liver, black and gnarled as the arm that thrashed wildly in it's bindings, fell to the floor.
That wasn't even the worst of it.
The worst of it was when the air rushed into the open cavity, when Tanzanite felt her insides shift and her ribs crack from the sudden pressure. One of them snapped, the jagged bone jutting through pale skin like a splintered branch. She felt as though her body was going to burst, as though her ribcage might crack outwards entirely.
The screaming hurt her own ears, and it continued even when the organs had pulled themselves back up into her body and the skin had stretched back out over it. It continued to echo off of the walls until it shuddered and cracked into a maddened laughter, a hysteria induced by the pain she had asked for and yet couldn't have begun to imagine. It echoed through the room, grew in volume until the harsh and rasping noise was almost painful to listen to, until Tanzanite threw her head back and screeched like some kind of lunatic harpy.
“Dead, dead, dead, dead, DEAD!” she sang the word between fits of laughter, her body rocking back and forth so hard that it made the bolts rattle and the chains clang, “DEAD, DEAD, DEAD, DEAD, DEAD. AHAHAHA!”
Her head was thrown back, and Tanzanite pounded her heels so hard against the feet of the chair that the wrought iron split her skin against the bones of her ankles, black blood oozing out as she laughed hysterically.
“In Europe, dead. In Africa, dead. Asia, dead! Australia, dead! All of them!”
There was no mistaking it. Even in madness, the way Tanzanite tipped her crazed features forward, fixing wide black eyes on the pair of them. She wasn't lying. As far as the Negaverse was aware, every senshi that had ever awoken outside Destiny City had been hunted down and destroyed. They had agents on continents that had never even seen a senshi's presence, just in case. They were ten steps ahead.
“But yoooooouuuuu,” Tanzanite's stare was suddenly all for Nemesis, and those black eyes held a madness that had not been there only moments ago, “Never you. Oh Nemesis – oh Nemesis – we are going to keep you alive forever. Forever, forever, forever.”
Tanzanite's body shook with a girlish little giggle, “We're going to tear out your eyes and saw off your limbs. We're going to cut out your tongue and carve out your sinuses. We're going to hook you up to machines to fill your lungs and keep your heart beating, and you will live forever. Oh Nemesis, we are going to make sure you spend every moment so aware. So aware. Oh Nemesis, Nemesis! Are you listening to us, Nemesis? We're going to trap you in darkness and make you so helpless that you won't even be able to scream to escape it. Oh, oh, the immortality we will grant you, our precious Nemesis.”
The General leaned forward, as though suddenly eager to be close to the senshi of decay, “Oh Nemesis, you'll be so beautiful, our little torso.”
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Posted: Thu Mar 31, 2011 3:42 pm
The tension in the room had swelled to a boil. The moment before Nemesis snapped, Ares could swear she felt it. "Nemesis!" she said, voice hard as diamond -- but it was too late. The eternal senshi whipped into action, and Ares could only let her hand belatedly fall to her side. She watched in silence as the horrorshow began all over again, eyes glazing to the gore. It was the only way to get through it without losing herself in it.
Ares killed, yes, but this was something entirely different. Tanzanite might enjoy dangling people off rooftops by their intestines, or punching her claw through a teenager’s chest, but the Senshi of Smoke was more traditional. She snapped necks, slit throats, punched kidneys, tossed people from rooftops sans intestine puppet-strings. For all that one might say of her penchant for violence, Ares had never been a creature who craved gore.
Here, watching Tanzanite’s intestines spill out into her lap like ice sloughing off the side of a cliff face, Ares felt disturbed, for a moment, by her own actions. This hardly ever happened, not since long ago in the Black Moon Kingdom when the murder of her parents had sent her on a rampage. She destroyed a small village to bring her parents’ murderers to her own particular brand of justice, and had it not been for the silence of Captain Aphrodite, Ares might have been disgraced or even executed for her crimes against citizens. It was perhaps the only thing that preserved her obedience to the now deceased Captain of the Black Moon. Aphrodite made a sacrifice of duty for Ares – a sacrifice that she didn’t have to make – and the senshi would always be grateful to her for that, even after the girl’s death.
Just as quickly as the nightmare unfolded, it reversed itself, transforming spilled blood and bile back to scarred skin. Then Tanzanite began to speak, and Ares felt her heart sink to an entirely new depth of horror. She didn’t care about the threats that the Negaverse General leveled at Nemesis. She didn’t care about all the monstrous promises that the beast spewed. Ares only cared about the crazed honesty that she had seen in Tanzanite’s eyes, an undeniable glint that said: Here is the truth you asked for, Ares. Here is the revelation you sought to learn.
Super Sailor Ares believed that they were an armslength from catching up to the schemes of the Negaverse.
They weren’t even in the same hemisphere.
Realization hit her hard like a wrecking ball to the gut. She grasped there involuntarily, face screwing up with rage, the exact kind of rage that she felt limited Nemesis’ ability to ever truly be a leader. Europe. Dead. Africa. Dead. Asia. Dead. Australia. Dead. The bodies of senshi were littering the globe in shallow graves and not a single goddamn ally had raised a fist to stop it. How could they? How could they possibly have known? All of this time, Ares believed that Destiny City was special, that it was unique, but a grim truth sprawled out before her, clogging up every synapse in her brain:
Destiny City was not the first colony in a burgeoning fledgling nation.
It was the last vestige of a dying empire.
In spite of her resolve, Ares began to tremble. A wave of fury was rising in her, starting in the tips of toes and crawling up through her knees. It stopped to boil in her stomach, and then crawled its way up her throat, seizing her sinuses and filling them with steam. Death was a necessary part of war. Ares fully expected heavy senshi casualties, even if they killed twice as many Negas. It was the not knowing that turned her blood to acid. They were children playing in a sandbox. They were bear cubs crying in the den. All of this time, the senshi believed that they were fighting an even war, but now Ares saw that they were already losing – and had been, she reasoned, since long before most in Destiny City realized they were even at war.
Ares didn’t speak for a long time. When she finally did, her words rang with more bile than any she had ever uttered before. It spoke of darknesses yet to come and pain yet to inflict, tears yet to spill and bones yet to break. Her tone was a promise – the senshi had only begun to fight in this war. The Blood Moon Court would bring devastation; Ares would bring devastation. Of that, the Senshi of Smoke was absolutely certain.
Her eyes narrowed to hollow points on the crazed, madly grinning face of General Tanzanite. “Nemesis,” she barked coldly. Blackness hung in the air, a pregnant pause slowly filling with every ounce of ire that Sailor Ares possessed. “Again.” The thud of the Senshi of Decay’s boots echoed against the dank stone walls, each step a foreboding knell.
And then her hands began to glow.
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