51. Inevitable Outcomes

The sheer dread of those words, of her mere presence, is enough to overflow the crystalline pathways designed to trap and direct my emotions to power my body. My plates open on their own, emergency-venting green mist that flows and swirls like a swarm of kicked-up dust, retreating down the alleyway directly away from Melpomene despite a slight breeze in the opposite direction. The mists dissipate before they can get too far, of course, easily diffused into Earth’s relatively magic-deficient atmosphere, and my plates close back up when my body manages to devour the rest of the excess terror.

For the second time, my power reserves tick up past fifty percent.

“…So it’s time, then,” I say, my voice coming out as a whisper. “You’ve finally given up trying to pretend to be a good person.”

“There are some things more important than you and me, Luna,” Melpomene answers, confirming every last one of my fears. God, she’s cracked. She’s finally cracked and I’m fucked and there’s nothing I can do!

The world moves as slowly as it ever has, not even the threat of lethal combat having overcharged my mind like this. I want to scream at her, I want to threaten her, I want to berate her and tear her down. I’d try to kill her if I could. But I know none of those things would help. I know I can’t give her more reasons to ruin me.

“Wait,” I beg. “Please. Please just… walk away and leave me alone. You don’t have to do this, Melpomene.”

This is the part where I realize I’m overreacting, right? She looks at me in surprise and tells me she’s just here to give me an update to the goddamn grocery list. Surely. Surely it’s not what I think it is.

“Your strategy was… a worthwhile opening move,” Melpomene says. “But we all knew it was never going to be enough. The Preservers shut down our attempt completely. Humanity is growing complacent again. This is exactly how the tragedy repeats. We can’t let that happen.”

“Are you listening to me?” I ask. “Can you even hear me?”

“You saw that city!” Melpomene snaps. “You saw what the Preservers did! What the Antipathy had to do, to save themselves from a fate worse than death! That is what we are fighting against, Luna! Quit being so goddamn selfish!”

Aaaaaaaaaaaaah. It hurts. It hurts it hurts it hurts. I want to attack her so badly it hurts. I place one hand on my chest, as if applying pressure to unyielding steel will somehow quell the heart attack in my soul.

“This is urgent,” Melpomene insists, her eyes burning a violet so radiant I couldn’t possibly break away from her gaze. “We don’t have time to waste anymore. Don’t you see it? You have all the same information I do. I know what the Preservers are doing! What they’re really doing! It’s the simplest answer in the world! Think, Luna!”

And I do. I don’t have a choice. My mind whirrs, rushing through everything we know about the Preservers and the Antipathy. I think back to the Preserver-run power company. To what we learned about them extracting joy from children and adults alike. And then, later, their plans to take every emotion, to use the very hatred of the oppressed as fuel for oppression. Pure evil on a societal scale, unimaginable in scope and consequence.

Yet I also think back to Thea and Uma’tama’s embrace, the story the Preserver told from their own perspective about a grave mistake. About a society devoted to never repeating it. The two puzzle pieces just don’t seem to fit. The idea of someone not being aware that the Antipathy were that angry before they reached the sort of critical mass needed to destroy their own universe is, frankly, laughable. No one could be that ignorant without being completely removed from the situation altogether, but the evidence we found implied the Preservers were working pretty directly with the power plant.

…But I don’t need to square this particular circle, do I? I don’t need to tell Melpomene what I actually think. She just wants me to come to the same conclusion she did. ‘The simplest answer in the world’ to what the Preservers want, and what they’re doing. It feels like there are so many possible answers to that, yet… they all raise more questions. How and why. There’s only one option to what the Preservers want that doesn’t take any leaps in logic whatsoever.

“…They’re getting what they always wanted in the first place,” I conclude. “You think the Preservers are farming the Dark World for energy.”

“It explains everything,” she confirms, a manic fervor to her words. “When a Preserver closes a portal to the Dark World, they do it by gathering the residual mist and draining the fragment of strength. That’s why the Dark World isn’t healing, despite all the energy it’s extracting from Earth. From the beginning, the Antipathy tried to destroy their world to deny it from the Preservers, making a world so toxic they couldn’t so much as stick a paw in without being attacked. And yet, using us as intermediaries, they found a way to exploit the Antipathy regardless. They’re doing it anyway!”

I… shit. Does this actually make sense? Is Melpomene right?

“Why bother?” I ask. “Why let the Dark World siphon energy from Earth, then siphon that energy from the Dark World? Why not just cut out the middleman?”

“So that humanity doesn’t know about it!” Melpomene answers. “Rather than showing up as conquerors and breeding resentment, they get to present themselves as saviors while they harvest us dry! And all the while, they establish a paramilitary organization of indoctrinated children to protect their own interests, getting away with it all simply because humanity never had any other choice!”

God, she might be right. Does it even matter, though? She’s going to ruin me over it either way.

“If we never had a choice,” I say, “what do you expect me to do about it?”

“Simple,” Melpomene grins. “The Preservers murdered the Antipathy, and now they’re raping the corpse. This was always going to come down to a war. We were fools to try and prepare for anything else. And you, my dear, have quite the close connection to some of their best weapons, don’t you?”

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!

“No,” I hiss. “Melpomene, no! Going after the Earth Guardians will never work! There are five of us! Five! The Earth Guardians have that many members in this city alone, and they’re a global organization! There are hundreds of them in America! Hundreds of thousands worldwide!”

“And I’m stronger than all of them,” Melpomene asserts confidently. “But you’re right. We do need to even the odds. Which is why we need to do more than just defeat the local guardians. We need their stones.”

Oh. Oh god.

“…You told me that I can’t ever reveal that I have a transformation stone,” I remind her. “You said the Preservers would crack down on it harder than anything else. If we start stealing transformation stones, the Preservers are going to react how the USA would act if someone stole a nuke!”

“And do what?” Melpomene smirks. “Send more Earth Guardians after us? We have an entire universe the Preservers can’t even touch, and all the resources therein. They can’t attack Earth directly to get at us, they have to attack the Dark World, and they have to send transformation stone-empowered warriors to do it! Every failed skirmish will be an opportunity to add more members to our cause.”

“Melpomene, I get that you don’t know how to do basic fucking math, but ten people are not any more likely to survive a force of a hundred thousand than five people are,” I say. “It doesn’t matter how strong you are. Large teams of Earth Guardians can take down kaiju, and they can certainly take down you.“

“Ah, but can they take down a kaiju and me?” Melpomene asks, her body practically vibrating with madness. “What about four?”

No. Not even she would… would she? I’ve been avoiding her for so long now, and she certainly hasn’t been getting better.

“For the sake of its vengeance, the Dark World provides,” Melpomene insists, producing the handheld device I recognize as the one Thea made to manually open and close portals. “We’ve been busy while you were away, Luna. We’ve been collecting.”

“You’ll kill thousands,” I tell her.

“And how many Antipathy were killed to create the situation we’re in today?” she asks. “How many humans have died from the callousness of the Preservers already? They barely even put effort into quelling convergences, and now we know why. Our survival is only important insofar as we’re the batteries for their power grid.”

…Was Uma’tama right about the Dark World corrupting the minds of the people within it? Or was Melpomene always going to crack like this? Does it even matter?

“Melpomene, this is never going to work,” I beg her. “It’s just going to kill people for nothing!”

“Then show me something that will work,” she orders. “Find a solution that hurts no one. Fix our entire society without a single drop of blood! Just try it, Luna! And when you can’t, shut the fuck up and submit yourself to me.”

My mind grasps in every direction it can, desperately scrabbling for any way out.

“What about Thea?” I ask. “And the others! They can’t be okay with this.”

“Anath will follow,” Melpomene says confidently. “Especially once she starts getting more opportunities to fight. As for Thea, you should at least understand that the threat of forcibly induced convergences is not an opening move on our part. They are a prepared response to escalation. Thea will understand that we have no choice, when the time comes.”

“And Nanaya!?” I demand. “There’s no way you snuck all this past her. She’d see through you immediately. She basically already knows what’s up with you and me!”

“Yes,” Melpomene smirks. “She does know. And you may have noticed she hasn’t done a damn thing about it.”

My response fizzles before I can even finish thinking of one. I… that’s…

“Whose idea did you think all this was?” Melpomene laughs. “Nanaya has more experience than any of us in fighting an overwhelmingly superior force and coming out on top. The mere threat of dropping convergences in the middle of unevacuated populated areas should spook the Preservers into not going full-force. Human lives are precious infrastructure to them, after all. Mass death might cut into their fucking monthly quotas!”

It’s only for the smallest moment, but my perfect memory catches it and saves it in crystal. Black mist pours into the air, leaking from her crystalline horns as she spits her hate into the world.

“You’re… you aren’t well,” I tell her. “Just wait a second. Please. If what you’re saying is true, this isn’t urgent, right? The Preservers want the current status quo. We’re not in any immediate danger. We have more time!”

“Time to do what!?” Melpomene howls, the air growing so thick with magic it feels like moving underwater. “It’s because the Preservers want the current status quo that we can’t just keep tolerating it! Are you content to just coast along while monsters drain the world dry and use our emotions for their own ends!?”

“My monster doesn’t really give me a choice,” I bite back at her.

For a moment, I think she’s going to lash out. She always lashes out, doesn’t she? She breaks things, destroys things, takes all kinds of petty revenge for every little slight I inflict on her. But this time, she does something far worse. This time, she smiles.

“You’re right,” she agrees. “I don’t. Bring me Castalia’s transformation stone, Luna. I’ve been watching you two. I know she trusts you enough to give you a chance.”

“Are you serious?” I ask desperately. “She’ll die without it, Mel!”

“Good.”

I stay silent. What could I possibly say? I’m not talking to a person anymore. I’m talking to an insane beast.

“She deserves it,” Melpomene continues, “for trampling on Thalia’s death the way she has.”

“Oh my god,” I hiss. I’d be hyperventilating if I still had lungs. “Oh my god. How can you understand absolutely fucking nothing about her if you’ve apparently been stalking us since this all began? How long have you been doing this? How often? Are you… is that why you tried to recruit me!? Because you’ve been stalking Castalia this entire time, and I ended up in so many of her classes? How do you even have a spell that can hide its own magical signature? How has no one noticed you!?”

“I don’t keep claiming to be the most powerful magic user in the world just to boast,” Melpomene says. “And I don’t have any more time to waste on you. Get me the stone. The Fulgora girl’s too, if you can manage it.”

Stolen story; please report.

“You seem to have altogether way too much time to waste on me, actually!” I panic. God, what has she seen? How long has she spent following me? “Is any of this even tactical, or are you just using me to hurt your ex!?”

“Oh, it is very tactical,” Melpomene assures me madly. “With Castalia out of the picture, there won’t be an Earth Guardian in the entire state who can so much as slow me down. By the time the Preservers respond, we will have a foothold that they can’t brush aside or disregard. The Dark Rebellion and the Dark Rebellion alone will protect our territory from monsters, and the world will learn that we don’t need the Preservers and their twisted idea of ‘support.’ Neither we nor the Antipathy are theirs to control! Our lives do not belong to them simply because they made us fear the dark!”

“Don’t make me do this,” I beg. “Don’t make me kill her.”

“…I wouldn’t be so confident Castalia will die, if I were you,” Melpomene says. “But if she does, then so be it. Get me that stone.”

And so the orders themselves are etched in stone, my soul bound by ever-tightening thorns. I’d gotten so used to the agony, but a squeeze is all I needed to be reminded of what I am. The Cage of Returning Pain. Know the suffering from which we named ourselves Antipathy.

From the very start, this weapon was built to force people to kill their own loved ones. It was meant to trap a Preserver’s soul and use it to fight the Preservers. That was the degree to which the Antipathy hated. That is the sort of monster Melpomene fights to avenge now.

And the cage is working. I understand its creators better than almost anyone. It might not be the deep roots of all-consuming hatred that drove the Antipathy, but I know that if I could I would destroy anything I had to in order to kill Melpomene right now, if only out of sheer desperation.

“Your disguise is now only useful to me insofar as it helps you take what I need from you,” Melpomene continues, killing me ever further. “The time for passive reconnaissance has ended. The time for war has begun.”

The air only gets thicker. Oh, god. Someone save me. Someone strike me dead before it’s too late!

“You’re doing this on purpose,” I breathe. “There are so many other ways you could do this, but you’re hurting me on purpose.”

“I’ve grown to care less for you, in our time apart,” Melpomene says. “Convenient, then, that your utility as a source of strength can be increased at the same time as your utility as a weapon. Now quit wasting my time, Luna. You have until the end of the week to get me her stone, one way or another.”

The end of the week!?

“Is that Saturday or Sunday?” I’m forced to clarify.

“Saturday,” Melpomene sneers. “Surely you won’t need more than four days for such a simple task. Now go get it done.”