Baang!!! Vroom!!!
The instant he pulled the trigger, a spark caught, and the gun's muzzle ignited — flames roaring up his own finger, along his arm, over his shoulder, up his neck, and across the side of his face, burning everything they touched. The creature's head simply scattered, the pieces evaporating mid-air. The rest of its body caught in golden fire, and the rubble behind it detonated a heartbeat later, setting the whole area alight. One shot had turned the place into a sea of golden flame.
"Ha — knew that'd hurt! Ouch, ouch, that's hot!" Lukas dropped the gun and started blowing frantically on his palm. It was a genuinely comical sight — a young man with a horrifying glass hole in his chest, a glass-sealed scar across his face, half his body and hair scorched black, carefully nursing one burnt hand while apparently forgetting the rest of him was also on fire.
After a while he looked around at the destruction, sighed at the state of himself, and shook his head. A faint sound of shattering glass caught his attention. He turned to see the headless, flame-wrapped creature dragging itself frantically across the crimson glass shards, crawling back toward the portal.
"Nah. No way."
He picked the gold pistol back up and aimed, taking a slow breath as if steeling himself for the pain to come.
Bang! Bang!! Bang!!! Bang! Bang!!! Bang!! Bang!!...
He kept firing until the headless creature was nothing but a smoking crater in the ground. By now the entire left side of his body was wreathed in flame. "ah?! I forgot if it died another would come out of the portal. Lukas thought letting out a sigh.
"Luke?"
Lukas stopped and turned slowly. Standing in the air, was Captain Nathan — his body wrapped in fire that, unlike Lukas's, wasn't eating into his flesh. The two of them made for a strange picture, side by side.
Time seemed to have slowed. The silence dragging on for a long while.
" You remind me of a friend of mine." Lukas said with a
"Would you believe me if I told you this isn't the first time something like this has happened?" his smile spread across his burnt face as an old memory surfaced.
———
———
"Hahaha, l-look how burnt you are — hah. You smell nice, let me have a bite. Ah!"
A golden-haired boy in a white lab coat clearly larger than him, stood laughing amid the flames burning around him. In front of him, a white-haired boy the same age held a test tube of strange, burning liquid, his clothes and hair charred and still smoking faintly. The two of them stood outside, surrounded by scattered glass tubes and scientific equipment. This was obviously a case of an experiment gone wrong. A dangerous experiment for kids of their age if I might add, considering the amount of destruction around them, the golden-haired boy, seemingly untouched by the flames, couldn't stop laughing.
"Hey Lucy, this just gave me an idea for a poem." He pushed up a pair of golden-rimmed glasses far too big for his face, grinning wide enough to show off the gold tooth tucked in the top-left corner of his mouth.
"I don't want to hear it." The white-haired boy patted at his own head, trying to smother the last of the flames in his hair. "And take off those glasses —I already told you, they don't make you look smarter."
"Glasses make everyone look smarter. Anyway, listen to my poem."
"No — la, la, la, la—" The white-haired boy clapped his hands over his ears, chanting nonsense over him.
"What are you two doing?! Did you actually mix those two chemicals together? I told you not to!" A green-and-white-haired boy came rushing in, swatting at the flames around them with a fan.
"Hey, Berry — come listen to the poem I just came up with. Two boys under the golden sunset, Covered in flames. One standing untouched by the fire, the other so burnt, he put toast to shame "
"That's a stupid poem"
"What? No way! You of all people should appreciate it. You like poems."
"Yours is stupid."
"Hey guys? Help me put out the fire, would you? What if my dad come comes home?"
———
Nathan's gaze drifted over the golden flames still licking at the rubble, then settled on the golden gun in Lukas's hand.
"I take it this 'friend' of yours is a Phoenix."
Lukas's smile widened. "You say that like you don't believe I have frien—"
"That's Phoenix fire." Nathan cut him off. "And that's a Phoenix feather. I'd know — I am a phoenix."
"I know," Lukas said, still smiling.
"I know you know."
"But the fact that you doubt I could have a friend at all, Captain, really wounds m—"
"Stop changing the topic, Luke." The flames around Nathan seemed to swell. "Where did you get that gun. Where is the monster? How are you still alive? Who are you really?"
Worst case scenario, Lukas thought.
Phoenixes were mythical creatures, and mythical creatures were bags of resources — their bodies could be turned into weapons, into pills for strength and used for many purposes, causing them to have been victims of hunts across the cosmos over the years. Some had earned recognition as intelligent species with rightful claim to their own territory, but plenty of hunters ignored that entirely. Mythical creatures, as a rule, were proud, and Phoenixes especially so; it was vanishingly rare to see one voluntarily mingling with other species outside their territory. Captain Nathan was practically an anomaly in that regard. And given the long, bloody history between hunters and the hunted, mythical creatures tended not to forgive harm done to their own by outsiders. Watching Nathan's unblinking stare, Lukas understood exactly how easily the wrong answer here could turn into a fight.
Vroom!!
Both of them looked up at once. A massive portal had opened in the sky, and out of it descended an enormous spaceship.
The Tower. I need to go. Now.
Lukas lifted his right hand, palm open, and pushed forward — as if pressing against the air itself.
Nathan turned, catching the motion.
Creeak!!
The sound of a door reached Nathan's ears causing his body to freeze momentarily. The space in front of Lukas warped into a transparent glass door, cracking open just enough to reveal a dark interior beyond. Lukas had torn a literal gap into the fabric of space. The air around them was pulled forcefully toward the darkness beyond the door — even the flames clinging to Nathan's body strained toward it. Only Lukas stood unaffected.
"Nathan," Lukas called. "Every journey ends somewhere, and this is where ours does.. On this one, you were my Captain."
He started toward the door.
"Lukas!!" Nathan shouted but for some reason he couldn't bring himself to move closer the energy around the door chilled him. Just as Lukas was about to step through, a ringing sound filled his skull, and words assembled themselves in the air before him.
"A lost man is not afraid of losing his way. "
Recognition flickered across Lukas's face. The ground beneath him cracked and shattered like glass as a violent suction erupted from below. The glass door slammed shut, the torn space snapping back to normal. Lukas plunged into the dark space that had opened beneath him, grabbing at the jagged glass-like edges of the floor — the shards biting into his palms.
Nathan didn't move. That's when he saw it. He'd been too fixed on the Phoenix fire and the gun to notice, until now, the state of Lukas's body.
A hole in his chest. A glass-sealed scar through his right eye. Burnt skin, burnt hair. He looked genuinely monstrous — and yet not a single drop of blood anywhere on him. Nathan's eyes dropped to the hand gripping the glass edges. No blood there either. He looked at Lukas's face, searching for pain, for anything. Nothing. Just a badly wounded man, hanging on, trying not to fall into the dark beneath him.
Then, for the briefest instant, something crossed Lukas's face. Pain? No. Frustration? No.
Something in Nathan understood, a half-second before it happened, exactly what was coming — and still he didn't move to stop it.
Lukas let go.
He didn't fall. He didn't lose his grip.
He let himself fall.
——————————
In a busy bookstore, an old-looking book sat alone on a table. Without warning, its pages began turning on their own. Suddenly writings started appearing on the pages, it was the story of a peculiar, half-mad man known only as 'The Traveller' — until it reached a blank page, where new words began to bloom across the paper. It wrote of the dark creature that had attacked the 1008th district. It wrote of Lukas being stabbed, of the Tower's spaceship descending, of Lukas falling through the glass-like floor.
Then it wrote: The Traveller arrived in Port town the 26th. And closed itself.
A moment later it opened again and did something it had never done before in all its writing — it erased. The last line vanished from the page, and the book rewrote it, slightly changed.
Dumb Lukas arrived in Port town the 26th.
The book snapped shut, and the sound it made was unmistakably a child's pout. "Hmph."
Coincidentally, or not, the signboard outside the shop window also read: Port town the 26th.
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