53 A Night of Red Blood
The streets were closed; the evening air glowed crimson with the last vestiges of dusk.
The silent machines of HamHamPangPang whirred to life as a woman turned them on.
Her pupils were fractals of muddled red light, pulsing at the rate of her heartbeat as she poured a steaming cup of coffee for herself behind the counter.
Elena sipped from her cup, letting out a slight moan of contentment that broke the silence in the air.
"This place is so great..." She stared down into the cup in her hand with nostalgia, blowing the steam that rose off of it.
Colors faded away. Her surroundings turned dark as her thoughts slowly became inaudible to her own mind.
"Want a cup, dear?" She licked her lips, glancing behind her expectantly.
It was the effect of the aura of a certain Colored Fixer.
The Black Silence stood behind her, his void black mask hiding his entire face and wreathing it in impenetrable darkness.
"How many did you harvest for the last shrine alone? Ten, twenty thousand lives?" The man raised his arm, and a shadow on his mask coalesced until it formed a dark halberd in his grip.
"Little Silence, pawn of the Head~ Come, give me a good show!"
She smiled, splitting her face wide with a searing, bloodthirsty grin. She reached into her pocket, pulling out an obsidian crescent mask, for the performance of her life. Or death.
...
Asher leapt out of bed, running to the kitchen at Mei's call.
The aroma emanating from dinner erased the worry he had about 'social order'.
Asher didn't know how Mei could think of so many recipes, but every dinner he had with her brought something he had never seen before.
Today's menu was a loaded baked potato, filled with melted cheese, green onions, sour cream, and bacon.
Bacon... He poked at the flakes of fried pork sprinkled on the potato. This was the first time Mei had cooked something with meat in it. Even though he could tell it wasn't human meat from the smell of it, he was still hesitant.
But as Mei stared at him in anticipation, he shrugged, using his fork to wrangle out a chunk of steaming potato, topped with everything it was loaded with.
"Mm-!" What else could he say; it was good. And thank goodness, the bacon tasted nothing like human meat. Human meat tasted a bit more flavorful, with less crunch to it.
Then again, human bacon would also be as crunchy... Stop thinking about human bacon.
Shaking off the disgusting thought, he savored every bite of it, following Mei's example. Food was also a good way of ridding the day's stress.
Soon, both of their potatoes were positively demolished, including the skin.
Asher thanked Mei for the meal with a short hug, offering to clean the dishes for her. She smiled and let him wash the plates, something she would normally do herself.
They enjoyed the quiet atmosphere, which was enhanced with the sound of running water.
"-!"
A blaring siren that cut through the air. Both Asher and Mei's phones emitted a screeching noise, an alarm of sorts.
Asher's last plate slipped from his hand, shattering into sharp porcelain shards.
The sounds of the alarms kept screaming until he couldn't think anymore.
Mei tugged him out of the kitchen and into the bedroom, pulling out her phone as she did. In order to be heard over the sirens, she had to shout at the top of her lungs.
"It's a Midnight alert from Hana! Star of the City nearby!"
Asher wasn't listening to her. A memory inside of him stirred the well of his consciousness just below the surface. His lungs contracted, squeezing his breath out in a shuddering wail, nearly matching the volume of the siren.
Mei's face blanched. She pulled him into her arms without a second thought.
"Please... Asher, we're safe here. Calm, calm..." She whispered into his ear, and slowly, he began to breathe.
As he took in a shallow breath, the residual memory sunk down the well, inaccessible once again. Fragments that escaped the System's seal, only able to convey a sense of traumatic dread.
He didn't know what just happened.
But before he could think about it, his jaw went slack.
Pulsating veins and arteries grew out of the closet and floor, cracking the floorboards apart as they inched toward Mei.
"Mei, watch out!" Asher leapt in front of her, pushing her behind him.
"Ow! Asher, what's wrong?" Mei followed Asher's gaze into her bedroom, but she didn't see anything unusual, only feeling a warm draft of air pressing on her face.
The bloody pulp oozed toward them. Veins dug into the floor, forming roots of blood and capillaries.
Asher slowly backed away, pulling Mei along with him as the crimson wave pulsed closer and closer. In Asher's vision, artery woven hands crawled along the wall, staining the hallway with sentient blood.
He looked at his phone.
(Midnight warning. A Star has risen. The Blood Red Night is near. Any missing persons after the morning survey will be considered deceased. Stay indoors. Midnight warning.)
Asher clenched his phone. This was one of the people he knew in his past life. Elena, the Blood Red Night. One of his...
[Closest friends.]
"..." What kind of monster was he?
They were in the kitchen now, as the hallway was entirely infested.
Mei cursed amidst the alarms. She tried to shake him off, but Asher's grip on her wrist didn't allow that. She fell silent as she looked back at him, noticing the fairy suit already materialized onto the boy's body.
Asher wasn't joking around. Mei realized that he could see something she couldn't.
"We have to leave! Now!"
Mei let out a weak protest before Asher pulled her away, tearing the door open as the blood vessels nearly reached his feet.
Finally outside, Asher could finally see the carnage made by a Star of the City.
The building in front of him, along with half of the buildings on the street, had been completely transformed into a writhing mass of bloody pulp.
The atmosphere became mirage-like as blood vapor diffused into the air, changing the dark sky into something beautiful yet bone-chilling.
A blood red night.
"M-Mei... Do you not see?" He raised a trembling finger to the bloody night sky, but Mei shook her head. However, she knew that something was wrong; the air was warm and smelled of iron.
Asher tried to pull her down the stairs as blood seeped through the doorstep.
"No... Is something happening to the building? Oh god, what about Bellecote?!" Mei turned to Bellecote's apartment, but Asher stopped her.
How could he explain that her friend was already dead, and it was useless to search for her?
Should he pull her away, or should he...
"Stay here. I'll check. It's too dangerous for you to some inside." He unclipped Wingbeat, smashing open the door with three vicious swings.
Asher had an inkling of a plan as he rushed inside. As soon as he entered, he ducked beside the doorway where a few parts of the floor were still uninfested, hidden away from Mei's vision.
A plan quickly formed in his mind as the vessels enveloped every living thing, evidenced by a few bugs that disappeared into its folds.
After a couple of seconds, as the floor slowly gave way to the crimson weave, he burst out of the broken door, panting. Of course, that was all faked, the blood was fairly easy to avoid to those that could see it. But this was part of his plan.
"She..." Asher paused for a second, feeling ashamed by what he was about to say, "a-absorbed into the floor. I'm sorry..."
The look on Mei's face as he apologized tore his heart apart.
A short quiver of the lip, before a forced expression of calm.
"Nn. Let's go. She would want us to live for her." This time Mei took the lead as she pulled Asher behind her, obscuring her trembling expression from him.
Asher didn't know what to say. He felt like that was the best time to reveal that Bellecote was dead... but maybe he regretted it now.
Still, wasn't it better to say Bellecote was absorbed, rather than telling Mei that she died from the Prescripts?
Since Mei's mother also died because of them. He tried to tell himself that he did the right thing.
Right as they reached the bottom, the building in front of them exploded in a shower of shrapnel.
Mei screamed reflexively as the rumbling ground disrupted her balance.
Then she immediately clamped her mouth shut. Someone was clawing their way out of the rubble. It seemed like the explosion was caused by the impact of the person's body onto the building.
A black-haired woman shrugged off the tons of rubble off of her body. On her face was a nightmarish obsidian mask, shrouding half of her expression.
The mask was embedded with crimson crystals on the eyes and mouth, forming a hideously wide grin on it. She laughed as she caught a glimpse of Asher and Mei across the street.
"Fresh blood!" The Blood Red Night bared her fangs at them, digging out a jagged pillar of concrete before flinging it at them.
Only for it to hit a cloud of white mist.
The concrete melted to sludge in front of their eyes, and the mist reformed into a humanoid figure of fog that promptly grabbed the two of them before jumping onto the roof.
Asher heard the mist whisper in his ear as they rose several dozen feet into the air from a single leap.
"I am the Silence's assistant. I will protect you for now." The mist's voice was of a mature woman, ethereal and soothing to the ear. It reminded him of the way Sophie spoke, though with a slightly deeper oriental accent that differentiated her from Sophie.
They floated downward gently, landing on the rooftop.
The Blood Red Night shifted her attention away from them as a black and silver comet shot toward her from afar.
The momentum as the onyx meteor slammed into Elena caused her knees to buckle. A bit of blood trickled from her mouth, which she promptly licked back up.
Asher took a good look at the figure obscured by swirling dust. A nondescript man wearing a set of pristine black concert attire emerged from the dust, twirling his weapon between his fingers.
The black mask covering his entire face seemed to wash away all the colors in the world. Asher's vision turned monochrome. Everything became shades of gray.
Mei gasped beside him. Even she could guess who the man was. They were currently seeing a living legend, a god amidst mortals.
When Asher looked behind him, the mist had transformed completely, also observing the wreckage below.
Black Silence's assistant had radiant white hair and pale skin just like Yan, but wore a neat black concert dress instead of an Index cloak. Being a head or so taller than him, the assistant's figure stood out from the two of them, like a guardian angel of sorts.
So began the clash between a Colored Fixer and a Star of the City. The street of parasitized buildings pulsed as they gave the Blood Red Night the life they absorbed.
Elena sighed, wreathing the street with bloody fog. Stolen energy coursed through her.
In response, the Black Silence's mask churned.
Color no longer existed. Only white and black, not even gray, existed in this binary world. This was the world his mask created.
Asher and Mei's consciousness slowly faded away. Even their thoughts were silenced by the mask's influence.
The assistant caught them as they wobbled to the ground, placing them on beds of white mist.
As the mist faded away, Asher and Mei had disappeared.
