The lost composer of London

Loss

"Amy!"

Two young children dashed through their school playground. The girl had stolen the boy's lunch and was sprinting with his sandwich flapping against her face.

"Amy!"

Teenagers tumbled from the sky, tied together with a climbing clip and a bungie cord that the girl disconnected from their belt. She gripped the release line for their parachute as they reached the arch of the jump and screamed joyously. The boy only screamed.

"Amy!"

A semitruck slammed into the side of their rental car. Both the boy and the girl tried to cover each other, but the brick wall of a barber shop crushed them into each other and fused their bodies with metal.

"Amy!" Neku repeated again, but she wasn't responding. Amy had curled into a kneeling fetal position and became completely unreachable. He cursed and turned back to the fight, narrowly dodging the rubble that the Butcher thing was hurling while also overwhelming Richard and Rocky at close range. It batted Rocky away effortlessly with its massive paw, all the while the bodies making up its form grasped at the air to pull him in and devour his body. Richard was riding his Noise around the beast, slashing away at its extremities, though all that really accomplished was making the Butcher's imposing shape more defined.

Neku brought down another rain of lightning and stones, but nothing seemed to faze the creature. It didn't even flinch when Oni's fireballs blew chunks out of its hide. If the Butcher felt pain, it was not showing.

"This isn't working!"

"No shit kid!" Oni shouted back at him. "If you got a better plan I'm all ears!"

"I..." I really wish I did, he thought. Neku had fought huge monsters before, hell one of them had been Joshua kind of, but all those had been slow and were easy to dodge. Butch, whatever he was at this point, was huge and much faster than something that size had any right to be. Neku had a pretty good idea what a lost battle was, and at that moment this was one of those battles.

He shook his head. That kind of attitude was toxic, and Neku had no time for it. He dashed to the side, waving Pins madly in an effort to contain the raging abomination between tumbling boulders and spears of ice. A whirlwind launched Rocky into the air and he hammered the Butcher with a double elbow drop. The attack was shrugged off passively and the Reaper was blown away by a series of headbutts from a dozen weathered skulls. A mound twitched in the Butcher's flank, and suddenly a spire of contorted bodies shot out toward Richard. They quickly grappled the Noise and devoured it, leaving the Reaper a mere moment to leap to safety. He glided down to the carpet of bodies and turned on a dime, sword in hand. Rocky haggardly came to his side, littered with wounds leaking Noise tendrils. Neku teleported between them and tapped both with a Pin. Their wounds closed, but nothing could be done for exhaustion. They had been fighting a slew of foes all night with very little time to rest. Neku, being the only one with a living body and having gotten maybe ten hours of sleep in the last week, was at the end of his adrenaline reserve.

"Ah hell..." The Butcher's massive fist tore through the carpet of bodies, the asphalt below, and into the three's position. A series of ear splitting snaps and cracks told Neku that most of his bones were now broken, and then he blacked out when his lower spine connected with a brick wall.

Consciousness came and left in spasms. Neku could not think, nor hear, nor feel anything below his arms. His vision darkened between sights of the Butcher lurching closer, ever closer. A few balls of fire denoted Oni trying to fend off the monster, but it paid him no mind. Each pair of eyes among the thousand seemed to be absorbed by Neku for reasons beyond his knowing. As though he was something it had never seen before. Its many mouths watered, creating a snail trail of bloody drool. It's fetid breathe ruffled Neku's hair now, the Butcher was so close. What was it waiting for? All those dead, blind eyes, sensing him, waiting. Its posture seemed to betray... disappointment?