Chapter I. - To Despair

Tears streamed down the face of a child, clutching its mother's arm to its chest. It was a child almost mature, but faced with such tragedy, a child nonetheless. The mother laid motionless, a flowerbed of crimson blooming all over her body.

There stood an evil darkness, looming over the floor-bound duo, breaking apart the very world of normalcy that had previously reigned over the scene. Its misshapen claws dripped with a foul-smelling, congealed liquid, its endless rows of teeth scraping against one another.

Against the backdrop of well-lit walls and cozy furniture, this presence radiated an indomitable dread. It possessed no heart, only dozens of crooked limbs and a malformed maw. No equal resembled it in nature, its whole, black appearance screamed abnormality.

Mere moments earlier, a beast of this caliber would be ridiculed as strange fantasy. Yet, here it stood, barging into the life of a happy family and tearing it to shreds.

The child cried, "Mom! Please! This isn't happening!" It grasped the wrist of its mother tightly, feeling the faintest of pulses throbbing within it. "This isn't real! This--can't be real!"

Unfortunately, not even the bawling of an infant could move a heart that doesn't exist. The leering blasphemy of evil raised its mighty talons, ready to strike and feast upon its mournful prey.

Before it could, however, a parent's heart forever stopped beating.

Silence.

Counterintuitively, the waterfall of tears subsided. No one cried or sobbed anymore, for all the youth within that room had died.

It felt as if time had stopped, a broken husk slowly accepting its fate of being devoured alive by a monster from beyond the veil of observable space. Except, the person that sat there accepted nothing.

Alongside remorse and hatred, a desire boiled deep within them. A desire to destroy this heinous monstrosity, to show it the same kindness it had shown in return, and to protect the innocence of Humanity from its kind.

A desire that was answered.

Like a torpedo, a blinding flash of scarlet burst forth from the heavens, piercing through a nearby window and into the beast's odious gullet.

A silver rapier, newly embedded where the light had struck, symbolised the death of the person who had watched their mother die. Theirs was now a new name, etched into the metal handle.

Clementia.

Without hesitation, the ALICE reborn rushed to her feet. Giving no quarter, she tore the blade free of its target's innards, jabbing it again and again into the monster's formless body. Her ferocious battle cry joined a series of terrible shrieks, creating a wild cacophony of death.

It bled. Vile shades of purple covered everything nearby in a thin coat of viscous sludge, including the two humans. As a last ditch attempt, the creature brought all of its clawed limbs barreling towards its assailant in a frenzied fury, rage dominating instinct.

Clementia ducked, diving to the floor with a pained grunt. This move let her narrowly escape demise, bearing witness to a brutal suicide. In its last moments, the being, previously untouchable, rent itself apart, cutting its body into two-limbed slices.

Doused in a thick film of sludge, the remaining combatant breathed heavily on the floor. She wiped her face with her hand, gradually accepting all the facts of what just transpired. She had known despair, experienced the fragility of life, but she survived.

Deep inside, she still hoped that she could wake up, that she wouldn't have to bury her own mother, but the coldness of the steel she held spoke otherwise. Yes, it was thanks to a miracle that she outlived the curse, a miracle as surreal as that very curse itself. Inspecting the rapier, it appeared quite ordinary. Aside from the etching, it stood out for its sheen and intricate, vine-like guard, all easily explainable as above competent craftsmanship. Its entrance, however, remained an utter mystery.

"Did I really use it to... kill that thing?" Clementia questioned herself. In the heat of the moment, everything became a temporary haze, one that she scarcely remembered already. In the 24th century, could such things really happen? Because of Earth's situation, aliens were out of the question, unless...

The girl rose to her feet, closing her eyes on the way to the broken window. Thankfully, slippers protected her feet from the shattered pieces of glass scattered around, allowing for a relatively safe trip. Once the fresh breeze whizzed by and caressed her face, Clementia braced herself and looked to the sky.

"Oh, guess not," she muttered. The sky remained as it had her whole life, grey and chaotic. Above the clouds, progressively darker layers of mobile debris blocked the majority of sunlight from reaching the planet's surface, acting the way treetops do in a forest. Some of man's greatest achievements floated there in pieces, orbiting the Earth and ironically preventing their creators from leaving it.

Currently, the shattered dreams of space travel not only painted a bleak, static future, but limited the origin of the silver sword to below the Kármán line. Clementia thought deeply, over-focusing on a singular topic as she did all too often. The idea that she wasn't the only person affected by a similar event entirely escaped her, even as her vacant stare fell upon the industrial skyscrapers looming in the distance.

Ping!

Her head suddenly turned downward, disturbed by a beep emanating from her pocket. She reached inside, pulling out a sleek, thin smartphone. Funnily enough, consumer electronics had stopped evolving since years before her birth, put to the background as all major tech firms scrambled to fix the effects of the Grand Frontier space crash. In fact, the sacking of that fleet sent technology centuries backwards, and even now, new phone models still failed to support past glories like the internet or instant messaging.

That notification... didn't sound like a call being received. Clementia glared at the screen, inspecting her disheveled appearance in the reflection. Her hair was an absolute mess, kept short to the shoulders and now all over the place. Its orange-brown strands curled wildly, framing a teardrop-like face of approximately seventeen. Her appearance didn't come off as unusual, but carried a certain harsh beauty in its current state.

Eventually, the amber eyes unexcitedly studying themselves were covered by a thumb, tracing a complicated unlocking pattern and leaving behind a filthy purple trail. On the home screen, an unknown app stuck out immediately, bearing a strange name and icon.

"ALICEChat?" Clementia recited. Not privy to the dangers of a non-existent web and hungry for answers, she tapped on the white-yellow icon of a bow wearing silhouette, prompting a loading screen to pop up.

Welcome to ALICEChat, new user!

Please wait, downloading additional data. . . .

"Down... downloading? Did they finally..?"

Download complete!

ALICEChat was granted access to your:

Gallery[x]

Contacts[x]

Soul[x]

Location[x]

"H-hey! Don't I have any say in this at all?!"

Automatically redirecting to 2ndMillenium. . . .

Connected to room: 24thC Hangout.

Please select username.

"This... I'm doing this for science. I killed an alien monster, some phone app isn't going to scare me! Let's see here..."

Clementia sighed, looking between the prompt and the handle of her weapon. Was that the name of its previous owner? No, somehow she knew otherwise. Nobody owned the rapier before her, and the name must therefore be her true--

You've selected: clementine

Is this correct?

"Yep."

The chat client released a cheap-sounding clapping noise, joined by a graphic of confetti spraying all over the screen. Finally appearing unobstructed, the design of the app proved to be simple and easy to navigate.

At the top, a thin menu allowed for the selection of servers, while the rest of the space was occupied by the chatroom itself. A single drop-down menu in the upper right corner let the user switch rooms and edit personal settings, their nick, profile picture and colour theme. Only one other person in "24thC" had the online tag next to their name.

Privately messaging: Merrigod.

"Hello? I'm new here."

"YEAH? FIGURES, REALLY."

"I... just watched my mother die at the hands of a monster. Then, a sword appeared and I killed it, only to be greeted with this app installing itself without a physical packet.

Should I be worried?"

"CONGRATULATIONS, YOU NOW KNOW HOW IT FEELS TO BE AN ALICE. GET READY FOR A SAD EXISTENCE OF LOSS AND MISERY."

"An Alice?"

"NO, DUMBASS. ALICE. IT'S CAPITAL."

"You don't need to be rude about it. It's kind of hard to tell with all the yelling you're doing."

"WOE."

"Listen, I won't annoy you for long, you're clearly not interested. Can you just explain what an ALICE is to me?"

"I'M GLAD YOU CAN SENSE VERY OBVIOUS SOCIAL CUES. FOR THAT, I'LL TELL YOU A LITTLE BIT.

AN ALICE IS CHOSEN BY THE GODS TO DESTROY EVIL AND PROTECT HUMANITY.

THE THING YOU KILLED IS CALLED A DEMON, VERY SIMPLE RIGHT?

YOU'LL BE GIVEN REVELATIONS AND GIFTS IN YOUR DREAMS.

YOUR ONLY GOAL IS TO KILL DEMONS, IT'S JUST WHAT YOU DO NOW."

"That's... quite a handful, but thank you regardless."

"DON'T MENTION IT."

"The demons are quite terrifying though, I'm not sure if I'll even be able to take on another one."

"OHOHOHOHO.

TRUST ME."

"YOU'VE SEEN -NOTHING- YET."