Legend Land: Tale of the Nameless God

Chapter 21.2: Aftershock β

Part 2

Words: 1305

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I kick the door behind me hard. I dive out of the room as Mutovinatum roars in rage behind me. Well, it was nice while it lasted, right?

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I slam into a rogue piece of the Ismar Trading Co. headquarters. I ricochet off the stone and concrete, spiraling through the air. Wind whips around me, blowing hot hair into my many wounds. The last vestiges of my clothes that weren't incinerated billow around me. Maybe not "billow". "Flutter weakly like a butterfly stricken with raging AIDs" would be a more apt description. And I'm nothing if not a man of expansive vocabularic skill and culture; also intense dastardly charm. But that's neither here nor there.

The pain of my physical body hits me all at once. It's too overwhelming to elicit even a groan from me. My entire body simultaneously tenses and goes limp repeatedly as I fall through the air. I feel like a misplaced contradiction, hurtling towards my inevitable demise. A piece of sharp metal hurtles past me, cutting me across my back. Something wraps around my waist and I'm yanked away from another large chunk of rubble. Concrete falls down and hits Wikolia's whip, which unwraps from my waist. I collide with the Wyvern in mid-air and we spin around, barely managing to avoid stone shrapnel flying past us. We do not, however, avoid a large slab of blast shield.

"Seven hells!" I shout. My words are nearly drowned out by the screams of those being crushed and burned in equal parts below, and around us. Thankfully, I was in choir for a brief stint as a child, and can be very loud when I need to be. The impact with the rapidly rotating blast shield shocked my system into full-on adrenaline overdrive. "Hang on," I warn Wikolia.

"Like I would let go!" she shrieks in hysteria. I look over at her, and nearly lose my grip on the blast shield. The Wyvern...has no eyes. Two empty sockets look like they were gouged out by a great many claws and teeth. I take my eyes off the blind assassin and look down at the rapidly approaching ground. This is going to hurt.

As the blast shield hits the ground, I leap off with Wikolia before our bodies are jarred by the impact. I hold her tight against me, and feel my body heat radiated back by her scales. I spin in the air and collide with a mostly shattered wall. I skip across the rubble and charred bodies like a stone before finally coming to a rest in cluster of corpses. I untangle myself from seared limbs and blackened wood. Looks like today was a bad day to protest government, guys.

I collapse almost as immediately as I stand, my injuries finally threatening to catch up to me. I drop onto my hands and knees. My palm brushes across a discarded toy sword, and I fight back the vomit. Come on Namonai, don't give in. I look around and see small bodies mixed in with the larger. A few even have most of their skin, and one man whose eyes weren't melted by the explosion looks at the sky without seeing. The gravity of the situation threatens to crush me, and I curl into a ball while ashes flutter down like snow.

"Cover me and bury me," I whisper. Why did I have to come back? Why didn't I stay in my head?

"We don't have time to mourn Namonai," Wikolia hisses.

"I can't," I whisper.

"Get up, we have to go!"

"I'm tired!" I snap. I sit up and grimace, clutching my ribs. I glare at the eyeless Wyvern. "I'm tired of doing this again, and again. Live a century, endure a calamity. Look around you Wikolia!" I gesture around, and try to tune out the whimpers of the last few desperately clinging to life. "Everyone dies, and I've stomached as much as I can. If I have to see something like this again...it'll choke me."