Thousands of people had come to Sydney. It looked to be more than in Berlin, but in reality people were just more packed. In the middle of that massive crowd was a hotel with a few hundred people sitting outside on plastic chairs. They were people who had volunteered to prevent anyone from entering the hotel or more specifically they stopped anyone who crossed a red line that had been drawn on the pavement.
Around a kilometer away from the hotel was a tall building where Tatadoro was laying on the ledge staring at the hotel. He hadn’t slept for 16 hours since he arrived in Sydney, but during that entire time he had not seen Joy or Sara even once.
Not having a phone with him to record was problematic as he knew fatigue from not sleeping would eventually get him, but luckily enough for him he saw a path forming in the crowd. He stood up to get a better look at them, but could only see the backs of 2 men and the shocked looks on peoples faces as they got out of the way.
As the they got closer to the red line Tatadoro knew something out of the ordinary would happen and not to his surprise the guards moved out of the way without second thought. Tatadoro couldn’t see through walls and was left only to speculate who they were until they came back out.
Kire and Iro looked around the lobby as they were walking towards the elevator, but one of the men outside ran to them and explained that the elevator was out of order, before he walked back outside he told them to use the stairs up to the sixth floor. They shared a disappointed look, but wasted no time and jumped all the way up in the stairwell.
Right before Kire opened the door into the hallway he jokingly asked Iro what room they were in, but after opening the door they saw a massive open space with all the walls demolished to turn the floor into a singular room. There was very little furniture in the room and the carpets were pretty messed up as the places where walls had been were very distinct.
They heard a constant clacking in the room and as there was only a ton of bookshelves in one corner they assumed it came from Sara who was ricocheting what looked to be thousands of balls off the wall. As they got closer the clacking started sounding more more like a jackhammer. She continued playing, but still yelled out “The first challenger?”
Kire tried saying they hadn’t come there to challenge anyone, but he was interrupted by Sara. “I know you didn’t, that’s why I even opened the door for you.” The balls then stopped mid air and Sara turned around to face them. “Well I’m very curious what has brought you two here.”
Kire looked around and grabbed one of the balls. “Where is Joy, I would like to talk with him face to face.”
Sara took a long look at Kire’s hand before looking back at his face. “What do you want to tell him, I can relay a message.”
“Who are you again and why are you talking in his place?” Kire asked.
“I’m Sara, I’m a tool for Joy to use as he wishes and I’m not talking for him, just simply saving his time.” She answered.
“Saving his time?” Iro chuckled “Clearly his time is valuable seeing as he is reading books by himself.” Iro pointed at the bookshelves where in the middle Joy was laying on a bed reading.
They walked to him and Kire asked Joy whether he recognized him, but was met with silence. “That’s why you came here?” Sara mocked him.
Kire ignored Sara and walked right next to him, this time Joy didn’t ignore him, but looked straight up at Kire.
“Do you remember when I came to your apartment a few months ago?” He asked again.
Joy was silent for quite a while as he stared at Kire. “I do.” He eventually answered.
While talking Iro had taken a few steps back without Sara noticing and was looking at her reactions without her knowing.
“What are you trying to do and why didn’t you kill anyone when you had the chance?” Kire asked.
“I’m not trying to kill anyone." Joy stated. "I created an environment that forces humanity to evolve.”
Kire acted surprised, but in reality he didn’t believe what Joy said. He asked whether he would mind if he himself went to kill them, but Joy had already continued reading the book and ignored him. Kire acted frustrated and stormed out yelling he’ll go on a rampage.
Tatadoro soon saw them step out of the building and walk back until they got to a car. Kire and Iro didn’t say a word to each other before they got there and even then they looked around before speaking. “Honestly you were pushing it?” Iro said as he sat down in the car. “Did you get the message to him?”
“I did and he even gave me a thumbs up.” Kire answered. “What about her reactions?”
“I doubt she noticed it, but she did seem pretty shocked when Joy said that thing about evolution.” Iro
Kire thought for a second while Iro was starting up the car. “Maybe the evolution thing wasn’t bullshit, I just assumed so because that was after he gave me the thumbs up.”
“Do I just drive back to Kate’s place or?” Iro asked.
Kire nodded. “Yeah, I’m gonna talk to Nidenel.” He closed his eyes, breathed in and fell asleep almost immediately. When he opened his eyes he was in the middle of a birch forest. It was almost new years eve, but the forest was orange like it would be during September.
He didn’t seem too surprised by it, but walked out of the woods onto a path on which he could see a person picking up leaves off it.
The person looked a lot like a human, but it had claw-like hands and horns. Kire walked a bit closer, sat down on the ground next to him and asked what the difference in strength between him and Sara was.
He got a very nonchalant answer. “Purely off Energy, I’d say 8 to 9 times stronger than you.” This frustrated Kire, he had never felt as powerless as right now. “How can I kill her?” Kire asked.
Nidenel held out a leaf in front of Kire and on it he could see Tatadoro standing atop a building. “Maybe you need to turn to your enemies for help.”
“Absolutely fucking not.” Kire yelled.
“Then you need to tell the boy to open his subconsciousness so I can talk with him.” Nidenel said gently
“Hopefully he calls me soon, I’ll ask him then.” Kire promised “But can you tell me where exactly Tatadoro is?”
Nidenel seemed a bit disappointed now, but complied. “Around a kilometer to the northwest.”
On the same second Kire woke up back in the car, he noticed that he had gotten a message, but before looking at it he told Iro to stop the car and stepped out to jumped higher than all the buildings. He saw Tatadoro looking right at him on top of one of them and used another building as a foothold to jumped right at him. Tatadoro was faster as almost immediately after being seen he had already jumped away.
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Kire tried to go after him, but Tatadoro was so fast that he had created a few kilometers of distance between the two of them. Kire gave up and jumped back next to the car as he was sitting back in and he took out his phone and checked the message from an unknown number.
It read. “What are you planning?”
Kire sent a message back asking who it was and got a picture of Joy back. He asked whether he or Sara was the one in control and Joy confirmed that it was Sara.
Then Kire asked Joy what their true goal was and soon got a response. “I told the true goal. Sara said that I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone anything or she’d kill them, but I thought to test her since you all were there.”
Kire was surprised, he asked Joy whether he thinks the three of them could’ve won against Sara, but was disappointed by his response. “No we would’ve lost.”
“Then why did you say that?” Kire asked.
“You are a part of her plan to evolve humanity.” Joy responded.
Kire was shocked, but he thought that this conversation was too risky to begin with. “Can we talk through these means in the future?” He asked, but got a very quick response. “No.”
Kire had his guesses on what would happen if Sara found out so he sent out his final message to Joy. “Next time you go to sleep, open your subconsciousness.”
At the same time Joy was confused by the message Kire had sent, but as he didn’t get a response to his question what it even meant after 5 minutes he threw the phone at a wall. He laid on his back thinking what it could mean, but the only lead he had was that it had to have something to do with dreams, so he went through the bookshelves and found a book about dreams which he read in a few hours. After finishing the book he knocked himself unconscious by gently tapping his temple.
Joy woke in a completely black room with nothing, but a bed and a massive circular window out of which the surface moon could be seen as well as millions of stars. He got up and walked out of the room into a massively tall hallway with doors all the way to the roof. Every door except for one was closed and when he walked to it inside he saw Sara and a few other people. He walked in and heard them talking in the same language that Sara was speaking to him in before he fought Isaac. Right in the middle of a sentence Sara turned right around, stared him in the eyes and yelled. “This is not real!”
Joy then remembered why he was there and everything dissolved around him, but when he blinked everything was the same as before. He closed his eyes to focus more and soon every person in the room turned into identical twins of himself. Joy went in to shake hands with one of them, but again everything turned back when he blinked. He remembered the book he read had explained dreams as an array of thoughts created by one's subconsciousness.
He thought for a while for a way to control it and quickly got an idea. Everyone turned into him again, but this time Joy himself turned microscopic. He ran to one of the copies and climbed into its ear hoping it would lead him into his own subconsciousness. He kept walking through the nerves and ended up finding a typewriter in there, the paper that it was writing on perfectly described his dream before he became lucid.
Joy thought for a while, but then wrote in the paper that he was alone in the room. This worked to fool his subconsciousness as when he blinked he was back in the room, but this time alone. He took off one of his own fingers and threw it on the floor, it molded into a copy of himself and Joy climbed into its ear once again. When he got back to the typewriter he had to think for a while, but then came up with the idea that the room he was in was his mind. He blinked once more and wound up in the same room, he then turned around and opened the door which to his surprise led into a forest.
Nidenel had taken the form of a human as he wasn’t sure whether Joy was an enemy who knew what he looked like. He was standing right next to him, but Joy didn’t notice it at first only after he looked around he got startled and accidentally closed his eyes. This time it did nothing and he asked “Is this real?”
“Not physically.” Nidenel answered “This is my dream we’re in.”
“Who are you?” Joy asked as he was poking at him.
Nidenel moved Joy’s hand away. “I’m nobody.”
“Okay. How did you do this?” Joy asked as he was looking around. “I’m still asleep right?”
Nidenel stayed quiet until Joy turned back to him. “In the real world, what are you trying to do?”
“Get rid of Sara.” Joy answered.
Nidenel was surprised as he could see that Joy was being honest. “Why?” He asked.
“So I don’t die.” Joy stated as if it was obvious.
“Die?” Nidenel chuckled, “Who could even kill you?”
“To Sara my whole point of existence is to be a weapon to kill the saint inside earth.” Joy answered, shocking Nidenel. "They need to kill me to use me."
“What does that mean?” Nidenel asked.
Joy realized that nobody on earth would even know what it meant. “There’s someone who was sealed inside earth because he was too difficult to kill.”
“And you’re supposed to be a weapon to kill him?” Nidenel asked. He stayed quiet thinking, but decided to reveal himself. “What’s your saint power?”
“Huh?”
“What’s your saint power?”
Joy didn’t expect him to know anything about saints, but he even knew he was one. “How do you know that?”
“The same way Sara knows.” Nidenel answered. “The Energy saints emit is different from others. Like the name implies it feels more… divine.”
Joy then got the first hand experience of it when Nidenel revealed his true form. “They didn’t seal me in here because I was hard to kill, but because I was impossible to kill. So I’m really curious what your saint power is.” He then grabbed Joy’s head and entered his mind similarly to how Joy entered his own, but it was nothing like that, he was greeted by something incomprehensible.
“WHAT WAS THAT!?” He yelled out after pushing Joy away from him.
Joy was a bit scared of Nidenel reactions, he was about to ask him what had happened, but he immediately woke up in his bed. He saw Sara at the other end of the room still playing with the balls.
To think that Nidenel was able to speak with Kire even though he was sealed surprised him and the fact that he stated himself to be impossible to kill, why would he be a crucial part to killing someone like that?
While laying there thinking he once again heard someone speaking to him, it was the same voice that spoke to him the first time on the day he burned down his and Michael’s home. He listened to it without a second thought and walked into the stairwell where he jumped to the lowest floor. Sara realized it and ran after him, in the lobby she yelled at Joy asking where he was thinking of going, but Joy ignored her.
He walked outside where the guards as well as the crowd was surprised to see him come out, all the yelling and noise quieted down momentarily as everyone expected him to talk. Joy looked around and back at Sara who seemed a bit tense.
Out of nowhere a massive lighting struck into the crowd plowing through them like butter. He fell unconscious and found himself standing in front of the typewriter, but was unable to move; he felt as if his body was being pushed apart from the inside. The people guarding watched as Joy laid on the ground screaming and right as one of them was about to say something every single person who was witnessing it had their head pierced by one of thousands of marbles flying around. Sara picked Joy up and carried him back inside, she sat him down on a chair and used some sort of special chains to tie him onto it.
Joy soon stopped screaming, but he didn’t wake up just yet as the typewriter was right there. It had to be a sign similar to the voices that had told him to go outside and kill everyone, but most importantly both him and Nidenel knew what had just happened, upon killing people in the crowd the Energy within them had been transferred to Joy.
As he slowly opened his eyes he saw that Sara was furious. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“They were being too loud.” Joy had to come up with some sort of excuse, but he also knew that if he didn’t say anything about him consuming the crowd’s Energy Sara would get even more suspicious. “What happened to me?”
“You passed out.” Sara wasn’t yelling anymore, but was still furious.
Joy was sure that Sara knew he had figured out something. “Why wasn’t I allowed to kill anyone while fighting them?” He now knew the actual answer, but was curious as to what excuse Sara would come up with, or maybe she would just reveal the truth.
“They can’t evolve if they’re dead.” Sara answered.
It was a logical answer, there was nothing Joy could say to get out of that situation, or was there? Before leaving Kire had said that he would go on a rampage, maybe Sara would actually care if someone like Tatadoro died. Or would she? How much would Tatadoro matter when considering the entirety of humanity?
It was worth the try at least. “Isn’t Kire going to kill them?” Joy asked, hoping it would worry Sara.
Sara started laughing at Joy. “You think he could?” Mocking him, but Joy’s seriousness made her reconsider and her face slowly turned to a more concerned one.
Kire and Iro were still driving, their destination was a few hours away from Sydney and although they could just run there in a few minutes Kire could only talk with Nidenel while sleeping so they had decided to use a car.
Their car ride came to a sudden halt when Sara and Joy landed next to them.