Crisis Core: The Novel

Chapter 55 - Family

The door to the Nibelheim Reactor burst open, and in strode a SOLDIER with two revenant wings. Zack charged in like a screaming eagle, the avian span of some mighty raptor flaring like flayed silk in his wake. He flowed through the loading corridor loping like a winged wolf to stand in the antechamber, bathed in emergency lights and ambulatory sirens that flickered off Zack in blood-rays. Steam shot out from slashed pipes and wires in a ghastly red fog. The disaster still lay decimated from a daikatana the week earlier, but this time new damage eclipsed the old...

Jenova's door was open.

A whimper—off to the side. Zack saw Tifa splayed in a bloody heap on the ground. He ran to her.

Her clothes were slashed to ribbons, and blood smeared the length of her legs. Her chest heaved in gasping breaths, struggling for oxygen amid low, muffled cries. Zack reached a hand out for her, but she lurched away. Zack flinched back at the horrifying confirmation of what happened here. Blood rushed from his face as Tifa cried, curled up into a ball.

"I hate you all. All you SOLDIER's. I hope you all die!"

Zack reached for her again, to pick her up, to carry her away in his arms, but she jerked and screamed.

"Get away!" Then, the magic word that made Zack pull back. "NO!"

He didn't touch her. Her aura riled him as if Zack were the one who'd done this to her. He couldn't believe it. His mind whirled in catalytic vertigo, a feeling between shock and rage. He rushed in a panic to the steps and then stopped, hesitated, and turned back. He couldn't leave her, but he had to go, he had to fix this.

In a phenomenal rush, he ripped the sword from his back, and ran into Jenova's lair.

Meanwhile, a silver-haired phantom in a black coat stood before an oracle like an altar. The tetraformic statue of a chrome sarcophagus leered like a lonely woman, wires for hair behind an eyeless metal mask. Sephiroth stood elated in her presence, speaking in a poetic monotone like the uttering of an elegy.

"Mother. The world of your eyes is the souls of the innocent ones. The crimson of your lips is the blood on this world's ground, that soaks its soil eternal. Your fingertips grace the silver grass, flowing from the waterfalls of your hair. Your voice, whispers I've heard in my heart all my life, leading me to the Promised Land. Let us go there, together. Let us take back this world, my imbroglio, my black dahlia, my Goddess. Mother. They have come again. But do not despair, for I am with you now."

Sephiroth flared out his arms, as if to embrace the sacred geometry of her prison.

"I had a dream, Mother. We meet at last."

Sephiroth put his hands on the unholy architecture, and ripped it from its casing. Groaning metal and mechanisms whined, wires ripped from their casings, and black blood flowed from chrome eye slits. He discarded the sarcophagus, and reveled in elated rapture at the Mako-filled tank in front of him.

Jenova awoke. Her eyes were daemonic indigo beads on an angular face with hair like silver comet tails. She had no appendages, no arms or legs, just a mass of flesh and breasts hooked up to transfusion tubes that fed her lifeblood straight from the reactor's core. Sephiroth stood evangelized, born-again, enlightened beyond the scope of the universe, while a SOLDIER dashed up from behind.

"SEPHIROTH!" Zack screamed. His mind still couldn't accept that Sephiroth was gone. Now this monster loomed in Chaos, pulling the world into his destructive void. Not if Zack had a say in it.

He ran into the chamber, wings and sword flaring, and leapt in a hypervescent downslash with the sharp edge of his sword onto Sephiroth. A daikatana flashed sidelong, batting Zack away, throwing him down the dark reactor neck that fell into the Mako chamber. He flayed his wings out to catch himself, and broke his fall on a glass suspension deck below ground-level. Tearing to his feet, he swung his sword out and screamed to the catalyst above.