Pleiades Saints

Chapter Three: Escape From LA

Chapter Three: Escape From LA

I awoke to a burning, piercing pain in my lower belly. I squirmed and writhed, crunching up into a fetal position and clamping my hands over my abdomen. It was an intense tearing feeling, as though someone were slicing through my insides with a hot knife. There was an immense throbbing, almost as if something was...moving inside me. I winced, biting my tongue and resisting the urge to scream out in pain. Just as I reached my breaking point...it stopped. Everything just faded away completely.

At the same time, I felt a warm, thick liquid oozing from my left nostril. I wiped it away and saw a red streak across my hand. Blood...why? What could I have possibly done that gave me a nosebleed? That, coupled with the horrific pain in my belly I endured moments earlier, and the fact that I was still no closer to explaining the mysterious chained sword that appeared into my hands from nowhere, only to vanish minutes after I escaped from Sachiel and Lilith...I didn't understand it. I had no idea what was happening to me, and the only ones who could give me that answer were the same beasts I was narrowly devoured by. Whatever the case, the Nephilim had done something to me in that blacked-out hole of memory, I knew that much. But...even if I did know, it wouldn't change anything about what was happening now.

A pair of soft, gentle arms wrapped around me from behind and held me close. "Shizuka...I'm glad you're awake," Kanato mumbled. "You looked like you were in so much pain in your sleep...I didn't know how to help you...and it made me sad. I don't want you to be in pain, Shizuka...I don't want you to hurt."

I weakly held onto Kanato's arms, stealing a quick glance of the purple-haired Lilin above my shoulder. "Just...just forget about it." After all this, I still didn't know how to act around Kanato. His childlike demeanor was comforting at times, but it was also unnerving to the point of being frightening. How could I hold his hands after he used them to decapitate some stranger in a single swipe just a day ago? Despite his appearance...I couldn't make myself believe the purple-haired, blue-eyed boy who saved me from a horrific fate at the hands of the Nephilim was anything remotely human.

A gruff voice called out to us. "Hey, you two done cuddling over there yet or what?" Kamiya Sorano asked. "We gotta go, we can't be sitting in this warehouse forever."

We gathered ourselves together and headed back out into the shattered city, walking along the shoreline from the docks. I hung behind as Kamiya Sorano and Emilia Marrero took the lead.

Kanato kept himself glued to my side, while the tiny pink-haired girl, whose name I learned was Mamika Hoshikawa, clutched onto my skirt ends from behind. "Where are we going, sir?" Kanato asked.

"To find a boat that'll take us out of Los Angeles," Kamiya replied. "All the cars are pretty much worthless, it's way too far to walk, and by the looks of things, it doesn't seem like anyone's coming to save our asses anytime soon, so it's up to us to save ourselves. If we could at least get to a place where we can find out what the hell is going on outside of the city, it'd be a step in the right direction. Bottom line is, the sooner we get away from that monolith in the sky, the better. Last time the military showed up, a dozen fighter jets got shot out of the sky.

No one's showed up since then, but they're gonna have to act again sooner or later, and when they do...it isn't going to be pretty."

I glanced up at the Nephilim ship once again. From down here, I got a good perspective of how massive it truly was. It had to be half the size of Los Angeles, at least. Any area it cast its shadow upon was cloaked in darkness. It was so huge, so menacing...and yet it just sat there in the sky, doing nothing. It didn't even make a peep of noise, despite the sheer amount of energy that would be needed to keep something that gigantic in midair for so long. 'Alien' was too tame a word to even describe it. How many of these things were out there, across the world? Hundreds? Thousands? Millions, even? The thought alone made me shudder. If that really was the case...then humanity was doomed to be crushed underfoot by these winged giants.