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Ruth Galatine couldn’t begin to describe what it felt like to feel wind in her hair again. To feel blood pumping through her veins. To feel her muscles tense up as they lifted her legs and propelled her across OPIA’s vast outdoor garden. If there was anything that Arondite’s fancy new hospital had that made it better than that claustrophobic old bunker, it was absolutely the raw size of it. Ruth felt like she could get lost in here. She almost wanted to get lost, to explore, to make use of her right to move around and touch things and live .
She thought she would never feel that again.
A voice suddenly rang out in her mind. Stern and heavy, but caring nonetheless. Ruth , the Sword of Hope said. Are you sure you should be out right now? You’ve only had this body for a few months. It might just fall apart if you keep pushing it like this.
“What are you, my dad?” Ruth said out loud, attracting the attention of a gaggle of students. “If I have legs again, I’m gonna use them! C’mon, don’t you want to see the city?”
I have seen the city.
“It’s been two years!” Ruth exclaimed. “Don’t you want to see what’s new?”
It does not seem to have changed much. Her Reflection replied. It is still as blinding and deafening as it ever was.
“You’re no fun.” Ruth said. She made a sharp turn towards a set of large glass doors, nearly slamming face first into a nearby ESPer decked out in Ridill’s armor. A part of Ruth was happy to see the dragon’s little toys still being used, and in such a professional setting.
I take offense to this. I am very fun. Replied the Sword of Hope.
“What is ‘fun’, to you?” Ruth asked.
Watching the movement of the stars across the night sky. Sitting in the rain. Have you ever sung a war song before? It’s a wonderful team-building activity.
“Exactly.” Ruth said.
Excuse me? The Sword asked. Ruth didn’t reply.
She slowed down as she entered OPIA’s makeshift lobby. The original lobby had been destroyed while Ruth was having her body rebuilt, and so the hospital had to repurpose one of the side exits for the time being. A veritable horde of people lined the hallway, and she could see at least twice as many more waiting outside in the nearby alleyway. It was a chorus of whining children and irritated adults, the same as any hospital.
Ruth wasn’t especially fond of hospitals.
Pushing aside a cluster of toddlers, Ruth exited the hospital, where she was greeted with another faceful of the cool air of upper Fuse City. She wandered out of the alleyway and onto the street. As it always was, the city was alight in a million shades of neon. Holographic advertisements hung from nearly every building, flitting between cheesy ads for different GEIST products every minute or so.
“SET SAIL FOR A NEW WORLD OF GAMING - JOIN ISLAND 7 TODAY!”
“LIVE RIGHT NOW IN THE GEIST DISTRICT! ACE GALATINE BATHWATER FOR THE LOW PRICE OF $99.99!”
“DON’T TRUST BIG OPIA AND THEIR CIALLAN LIES! TUNE INTO THE ABSOLUTE FREE WILL PODCAST FOR THE REAL TRUTH. JUST SAY NO TO FAKE NEWS!”
I was incorrect in my previous assessment , the Sword of Hope said. I believe this place has actually gotten worse than before .
Ruth progressed further down Upwind’s palm. This region of the city was less active as it should’ve been due to the infrastructural damage, but even with only half of its usual population, it was still abuzz with people and noise.
Ruth’s eternal grin grew even larger when she noticed two familiar faces loitering by the collapsed proper entrance to OPIA.
“Willow!” she shouted, running down the road. “Melli!”
Her old friends looked towards her and smiled. Apparently, the two of them had started dating while Ruth was dead. She would probably be more irritated about that if it wasn’t so gods-damned funny.
“Hey!” Ruth said. “What’s up?”
Willow looked back to the destroyed remains of OPIA’s lobby and lower floors. “Not much,” she said. “Been helping out the construction workers with cleanup duty. You know, I really didn’t expect those crystals to be so fragile. I mean, what’s the point of making them that big if they crumble from a poke? Seems inefficient.”
“Something tells me that ‘efficiency’ wasn’t the first thing on Cast’s mind when they froze the place over,” Melli responded. “Besides, they’re pretty! Can’t you enjoy that?”
“Rule number fifteen of the Hunter’s Code,” Willow replied. “Pretty things always want to kill you.”
“Then I guess that makes me a serial killer!” Melli said, giving Willow’s cheek a peck. The hunter let out a bashful laugh, and then responded with a kiss of their own.
They are very sweet . The Sword of Hope said.
Shut the fuck up . Ruth responded.
“So,” Willow said, looking back to Ruth. “What’re you doing out of bed? I can’t imagine Ridill would be very happy about that.”
“If Ridill had her way, I’d be wrapped up in a cocoon surrounded by twelve layers of artillery resistant walls,” Ruth responded. “I doubt a little fresh air ever killed anybody.”
Willow responded with an agreeing smile.
“But,” Ruth said. “I think you know as well as me that I don’t just like to stand around doing nothing . How’s about we head over to that boxing ring over in Rightshin? Tri-Act tells me it’s still up and running.”
Willow’s smile suddenly turned into an embarrassed frown. “Sorry, Ruth,” she said. “But I promised Melli we were going to see a movie tonight, and we’re about to start laying the new scaffolding down, so work’s gonna get real intense for a few days. But I should be free next week, if you are?”
“Oh,” Ruth said. Most of her upbeat tone had suddenly fled her voice. “I… guess that works. Yeah. See you then.”
“Actually, I think we’re free for lunch in an hour!” Melli said. “You could join us. There’s this bar in the GEIST district where you can fistfight robots for free drinks! You’d love it.”
“Oh, I just remembered!” Ruth said. “I left the oven on! Catch you later?” Without waiting for a response, she fled back down the road and into the hospital.
What was that ? Her Reflection inquired.
“Nothing!” Ruth spat.
Hm.
Ruth found herself back in the gardens, where she found her attention drawn towards the south, which she knew was where the ESP labs were.
“Well, if Willow is too busy, maybe Arondite will be free! Yeah, I’m sure she'd be down! Just like the good old days.”
Ruth strode over to the lab and kicked open the doors. This section of the facility had a strange feeling to it. Despite it being the place where she had been restored to life, there was something… sickly about it. Unsettling. Dangerous.
Are you sure you are alright being here, Ruth?
“Yeah yeah, calm down. It’s just a science lab. You need to stop worrying so much!”
As expected, she found Ridill Arondite half asleep at a nearby table, her weary eyes hanging over a mass of papers and datapads. A man sat opposite to her, sipping a cup of coffee. Ruth was immediately drawn to his blue tail.
“Are you okay, Ridill?” The man asked. His voice was surprisingly soft given his physique.
Ridill belted out a series of incomprehensible ramblings.
“Yeah, I should be good… just needed some time to think. Oh, hey Ruth,” she said. It took her about thirty seconds for her mind to re-register what exactly was going on. Her eyes shot open. “Ruth!” she said. “What are you doing out of bed?”
“Going for a walk?” Ruth replied.
Ridill’s face morphed into that contemplative pout it always did when she was trying to work something out in her head. Ruth thought that she was always the cutest when she was doing nerd shit.
“I guess that’s fine,” Ridill relented. “But I’d still like it if you tried to stay stationary for a bit longer. The conjoining of your new body and your Flame is still pretty uneasy. I’d hate for you to get injured and start vomiting out your lifeforce on the street or something. That’d be a pretty grim way to go. Embarrassing, too.”
“Well, aren’t you just a ray of sunshine,” Ruth said. She walked over to Ridill and swung her arm around her old friend, causing the dragon to let out a panicked cough as her bones impacted with Ruth’s arm. “Why don’t you and I get out of this stuffy old place and catch a movie, or something, like old times? I’m sure this little project of yours can wait a few hours. What is this shit, anyway?”
She grabbed one of the papers off of the table and attempted to read it. It was lines and lines of code that she was wholly incapable of understanding. She threw the paper behind her, which got her a suspicious look from the fish-man in front of her.
“It’s a new design for the ESPer suits,” Ridill said. “With all the new recruits we’ve pulled in that have preexisting ESP, I thought it might be smart to improve the tech we have to help assist them in adapting to using a Reflection in conjunction with their Anima. The main feature that we’re trying to include is more advanced augmented reality capabilities that add more finesse to the sensory deprivation mechanics. It could help in a lot of different areas by allowing for more fine control rather than binary on-off states of information processing. It’s been a real struggle to downsize VR tech into the suits, though. If you want to help out, Cam and I were about to start testing some prototypes. It might be a good way to get in some controlled exercise.”
“Rid, I don’t think the solution to science exhaustion is more science.” Ruth replied. “C’mon, live a little! I thought the whole point of this fancy hospital was to give you space to breathe, not new holes to crawl into!”
The fish-man spoke up. “Normally I’d agree, but the GEIST factories have been a lot less flexible since we cut ourselves off from a lot of GEIST’s previous oversight privileges… if we don’t get the schematics to them on time, they’ll just drop the project. I don’t think now is a good time to take breaks.”
Ruth’s fists clenched beneath the table. There it was again. All of these new people, these new systems. What did they know? No amount of fancy technology and big hospitals could compare to the cold hard truth, and it didn’t seem like anyone here had any of it.
“Look, dude,” Ruth said. “I’m sure you have the best of intentions, but I seriously doubt that you know Ridill Arondite as well as I know Ridill Arondite. So why don’t you just back off and let me handle it. Your little toys won’t get made at all if she collapses from exhaustion, will they? Let’s go, Ridill.”
She grabbed Ridill’s arm, and was shocked to find no short measure of resistance.
“No, Ruth, Cam’s right. We’ve got to get these systems in working order as fast as possible.”
Ruth’s mouth was agape. “You’re siding with him?” She shouted, pointing at this “Cam” person. Cam’s mouth opened for a second, but he shut it, apparently deciding not to respond. Ruth grit her teeth. Oh, was he trying to be the “better person” here? Stuck up new money tech motherfuckers. She knew those types as people as well as the back of her own hand.
Ruth, the Sword of Hope said. Their voice was cold and heavy, like an iron weight pressed to the back of her mind. What are you doing?
“Siding with him?” Ridill asked, her brow furrowed. “Ruth, it’s not a matter of opinions, he’s just right.”
Ridill sighed. “Look, I understand if you’re having a little trouble adapting to the new state of things here, but we’re playing a different game now. I have a lot of responsibilities, maybe even more than before. If you need some time to talk about it, I’m sure we can go over this soon enough. I just really need to get this done. You can understand that, right?”
“Fine!” Ruth shouted. “Be like that, then! You want me to go hole up in my hospital room like I’m some sick kid? Fine! I’ll do it!”
Ridill reached out her hand. “Ruth, I-” her sentence was cut off by the stampeding of boots and the slamming of doors as Ruth rushed out of the building. She stormed back the way she had come, racing towards that sterile, cold, white, dead hospital room that everyone wanted her to hole up in, apparently. Some part of her, deep down, wanted Ridill to come chasing after her, to stop her in her tracks and talk to her, like it was some shitty romance movie. But she didn’t come. Nobody did.
It looked like “responsibility” came first after all.
Hours passed. Ruth had locked the door behind her, rejecting all attempts for people to contact her. One of those motherfucking AI had still just teleported in and ran a checkup on her vitals, even if she kept on throwing things at it. She hated those things more than anything here. It was like Ridill had made friends for herself. Had she just abandoned everything about their past? Had she sacrificed the spirit of Station One for GEIST money and some big computers that pretended to be people?
Ruth, that’s incredibly unfair. The Sword of Hope said.
“Shut the fuck up!” Ruth yelled. “Get out of my head! You don’t get it! You don’t get anything! Nobody here fucking gets anything!”
She felt her Reflection grow dull, its presence disappearing into one of their memories. Good. Now she didn’t have to be bothered from more moralizing.
But, why did she feel so empty without it?
Ruth slid out of her bed and walked over to the window. Even at night, Fuse City sparkled with a million lights. A massive holographic projection shone down the road, playing a clip of her brother over and over again. It was some documentary he was in about his time as a member of FLOW that had immediately started production nearly the day after he left the team. She couldn’t hear what he was saying in the video, but she was sure Ace was rambling on about some made-up memories of camaraderie that his agent had told him to talk about. That’s what it all was in Fuse City. That’s all it was everywhere. Fake. Broken. Fleeting.
Ruth found herself sinking into her own memory. It was a specific memory, from maybe a day or two after she had woken up. Ace was standing over her, a weird mix of relief and sorrow on his face. He didn’t speak much, as he was barely able to walk himself, but he did say something to her.
“Welcome back,” he had said. “You’re alright now. Everything’s going to be okay again.”
In that moment, Ruth Galatine had found herself hating her brother for that. Ace was wrong. He was so, so, wrong. Everything wasn’t “okay” again. Nothing was okay. It was all different. Everyone she knew was someone else, a stranger wearing the faces of her past. Ace didn’t understand that, he never understood that. He was always so obsessed with sameness, with keeping his status quo untouched and eternal. Stealing Ruth from the jaws of death was no different, then, at least to him. But for Ruth, it was anything but. She wasn’t supposed to be here. She was a person out of time. Martyrs weren’t supposed to live in the worlds they had created.
Ruth slammed her fist against the window. The fact that it didn’t break hurt more than she was expecting the shards of glass to.
“Fine,” she muttered. “If I’m not supposed to be here, then I’ll go back. I’ll go right back to the front lines.”
She kicked down the door to her hospital room and hurtled down the hall. She passed by another ESPer, nearly knocking this one over, too. They were probably some kind of security guard. Would they alert OPIA that she had escaped? It didn’t matter. She would just have to be faster than they were.
Ruth raced down the twisting roads of Fuse City, jumping between train cars and elevators as she descended towards that yawning abyss at the bottom of the world. Where she had fought, died, and been born again. She understood, now, that it had become her only home. She accepted this. She would fight the Demonic horde until she perished again. That was her status quo. To give her life to make the world better, because a world with her was clearly worse off than a world without.
The drained world around the mouth of the Coda was utterly still. Not even the wind moved here. Ridill had always described looking into the abyss as feeling like “existing at the end of the universe”. Ruth didn’t understand it then, but she was intimately familiar with that feeling now.
“Well?” She yelled. “Get out here! Try to drag me back down again! Do it! I fucking dare you! Send your worst!”
Nothing. Her promised end never arrived. The world remained silent.
Ruth let out a primal scream. Streams of tears had begun to fall from her eyes. She reached into the void and ripped out her Reflection, a massive, rusted sword that was twice as big as she was. It slammed into the ground in front of her, the blue flame licking around its body the only source of activity and warmth in a world of pure stasis.
“Come on!” She howled. “Don’t you want this back? It’s mine! Come and take it from me!”
Nothing.
Ruth collapsed to her knees. She had fought against nothing, yet she still felt utterly defeated.
“Please.” She choked.
The Coda still refused to respond.
Ruth sat there, on the edge of the apocalypse, for a moment longer. Her whimpers had grown to full sobs as she was wracked with the pain of both dying and of living. She struggled to choose which was worse.
Finally, she pulled herself off the ground.
“Fine,” she whispered. “If you won’t come to me, I’ll come to you.”
She took a single step forward, preparing to leap into the void below. But as her foot hit the ground, she felt a sudden resonance.
Ruth Galatine . The Sword of Hope said. Cease this cowardice .
“Huh?” Ruth said, her voice mangled by tears.
Excuse my language, but I am struggling to understand what on earth you are attempting to achieve here. Going out in a blaze of glory? Ruth, you have already attempted that before. And yet here you stand, hale and whole. What ends are you striving for ?
“I…” Ruth’s sorrow suddenly found itself upended by anger once again. “Shut it! Stop trying to talk about this shit like you’re so much smarter than me! You’re a fucking sword!”
I am asking you a simple question. The Sword of Hope responded. As a weapon, I would like to know in what way I am to be wielded. I will ask again. What are you hoping to achieve? Are you planning to single-handedly annihilate the Demonic Courts? Do you seek to harvest so many Reflections from the world below that OPIA could arm the entire world against the apocalypse? Are you simply after the thrill of bloodlust?
“No!” Ruth shouted. She punched the massive blade with everything she had. It stood steadfast, a pure warmth emanating from its body onto Ruth’s fist.
Then what?
“I…” Ruth said, her voice wavering. “I don’t… I don’t know…”
She collapsed once again, tears streaming out like rain in a thunderstorm. Her head pressed against the Sword of Hope’s blade, and she hoped for it to cut straight through her. But it did not. Rather, she felt its warmth spread throughout her body and into her very soul. She felt a strange feeling, the impressions of a memory. A familiar memory, although not hers. The first image that the Sword of Hope impressed upon her. It felt like an eternity ago that she had felt these emotions. The emotions of a million different souls bearing the weight of the world as it came crashing down upon them. No one person’s fire burned brighter than those around them, but together, the flames knit themselves into an inferno rivaling the brightest of stars. This was the endless fire that was the Sword of Hope’s true nature.
“Gods,” Ruth whimpered. “What the fuck am I doing?”
Fret not, Ruth Galatine . The Sword of Hope replied. All heroes stand at the precipice of the abyss of doubt eventually. Many of them more than once. But hold steadfast, your allies are approaching.
“Okay,” Ruth said. “I’ll… I’ll try.”
I would expect no less from my champion.
Ruth felt the glow of headlights behind her. She turned around to see the silhouette of Ridill standing behind the face of a car. With a deep, profound breath, Ruth dispelled the Sword of Hope and turned back towards the blinding light. Each step forward was agonizing, but she took them anyway. If she had lost her place in this world, then she could do no more than cut away a new one.