Chapter Text
Mona hates being outside, and she hates that she hates it, now. Being under the night sky like this was once her greatest comfort—at least it was, before the Abyss unhinged its jaw and swallowed up every shining star alive. It detested any light that wasn’t its own, and now, she has to subsist underneath an achingly false sky. It blared with the same artificiality as the flickering, sterile lights of a hospital or the dim torches surrounding her now. It wasn’t as obvious to the others, but even an amateur astrologer could detect the stagnancy of this projection.
Ah, right. She was an astrologer, once. She’d nearly forgotten that.
Mona Megistus was once the pride of her field. She worked for any and every advancement they made, and publishing a research paper without her lavish name creeping into the footnotes or citations was inconceivable. One so determined to seek after truths beyond the earth was certainly bound for greater heights, but her mentor was always keen to remind her that there were consequences to an unabashed pursuit. Perhaps, if she hadn’t been so stubborn back then, the Abyss wouldn’t have swallowed her up as well.
But she doesn’t have the luxury of time to lament anything. This was a new round in her new life, and she had to be at her best. Her insight had managed to whisper to her beyond the firmament, today, and there was only one word she could make out.
“New.”
A new what, she has to wonder as her eyes dart around every shadow against the treeline. A new obstacle? A new opportunity? It was going to eat at her the entire match, surely. If anyone she could trust from her team was to meet her at this cipher machine, perhaps she could pose the question to them—there were at least five to complete, if they all weren’t dead before then.
Mona, at the very least, knows she could have hers done in a solid couple minutes where it would take others a dozen. Such was the benefit to her genius. Many different “survivors” of this place have come and gone since she was first thrown into this cycle, but they all seemed to boil down to the same set of practical applications. Some were proficient in healing wounds, others were stronger and swifter of body… more suited to escaping pursuit compared to someone as fragile as her, so she had to prove herself in other ways.
Each late night at a typewriter and every starlit secret she’s painstakingly discerned has culminated into this… function. The same could be said for anyone else, of course. They all had to do what they needed to survive, and they all wanted to live to see the same proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.
Mona, of course, knew by now that all of the lights in the Abyss were false. She would never want to quash someone else’s hope, though.
She continues cranking and typing and racking her brain for familiar codes, and it’s a good enough distraction. She’s seen them all hundreds of times, but grasping the answers they give feels like air decompressing in her lungs—there, and then gone with her next breath. Many with her same proficiency didn’t mind it too much, as each cipher brought them one step closer to unlocking the gate, but Mona was never happy to see hard work unrewarded with an answer.
Fate, as it has been tending to, of late, gives Mona her answer in the form of a circuit sparking loudly in her face. The single snap of a twig succeeding the sound inspires much more fear.
Mona’s swiftness in completing machines made her an ideal target to chase. She’s been at the blunt end of a blade or a whip or a chain far too often, and she certainly has the scars to show for it—but disadvantage always forces the best out of her, and she’s become an excellent hider in her time here. The forest, surrounded by tall, dense verdancy as it was, makes it easy for her. It was among the kinder places one could hope to survive in, notwithstanding the killer likely skulking about by now.
The crunch of the twig turns into the smallest, most imperceptible rustling of leaves on the other side of her ear, and Mona has a very simple set of options. Finish solving the cipher, which was so, so close to being done, or abandon the machine early to chase the end of her hammering heart. It’s simple, but so quick to mess it all up if she chooses wrong. Something in the air shifts and her soul twinges in her body before whirling around and coming face to face with—
Oh. The strongest part of her intuition had been expecting to see some lumbering, stalky killer, but the person in front of her was…
“…Hello.”
There’s a man staring at her. She’s not sure how long he’s been staring at her, but he seems surprised to be addressed. Mona sighs sharply between her teeth, her head whipping quickly around whatever corners or crooks a killer might hide behind. Her heart is settled, so she makes a choice for both of them.
She marches up to where he’s standing and makes a grab for his arm, dragging him to the machine before she settles back at the helm. He doesn’t move beyond that, and she can feel him staring a hole into her head.
“What are you doing?”
Mona pauses and half-turns to look at him. It’s her first proper look at him, and she makes sure to drag her gaze as if to emphasize the redundancy of his question. He seems dressed for stealth, to his benefit—wrapped in a dark cloak that seems to blend into the night, with a hood drawn over his head that seems to perfectly frame his face. A few stray wisps of indigo hair seem to be peeking through it, as well as a white rim of something cresting his head… a baseball cap, perhaps? Not that it matters. Looking too close could be punishing, and she had her priorities.
“I am trying to solve this cipher, which will give us one part of a five-digit passcode to unlock the exit gate, which we will hopefully be getting through before being brutally maimed by whatever is in this forest with us.”
He drags his gaze up and down her, just as slowly. “I don’t think anything of what you just said remotely applies to me.”
Mona has to hope the dials of the machine won’t break under her grasp. How could he even say that, in such a blasé turn of voice? It was as if he had no idea what was at stake, here! Someone from their team could be stricken down and chained up, by now, and she was wasting time on some ignorant, audacious—
…New survivor.
“New.” Oh.
Even for how long she’s been stuck here, Mona can’t be sure how many people have fallen victim to the Abyss. Faces blur, and so many have come and gone that she clings to any familiar teammate that she can. It must be the same for them, surely, and this new player would need someone reliable like that for the trials ahead. He was a sacrificial lamb, like her, but Mona would take him under her wing and show him that they had teeth.
“It does apply to you. More than you realize right now.” She gestures for him to approach, extending her hand in a less rigid motion than before. “My name is Mona. Mona Megistus.”
He considers her hand the way a fish may consider bait on a lure before firmly grasping it in his own. “Scaramouche.”
His name gives her pause, and his grip is… jarringly firm, for someone so slight of frame. This is a good thing—he’ll be needing to put those hands to use, soon enough.
“Well, Scaramouche, welcome to the Abyss. Now get over here and help me with this thing. We’ve wasted enough time on pleasantries.”
His gaze flicks from her to the machine and back again. The glint in his eyes tells her that he seems to be considering something, but she can’t for the life of her decipher what. The urgency of their situation wouldn’t usually allow for the infuriating performance he’s putting on, at this moment, but Scaramouche seems to have all the time in the world.
“…No, I don’t think so. I’m going to go find some of the others.” He smiles at her before retreating into the treeline. It’s a cheeky, cat-like grin, as if he’s holding a plump little canary under his tongue. “Nice meeting you. We’ll see each other later… Mona Megistus.”
Mona watches him saunter off. He saunters off, and the sheer aura of carelessness dripping off of him causes her to lose focus. The machine short circuits again. She curses, whipping back around to it and silently hoping the killer of this match decides to find Scaramouche first. It’s a horrible thing to wish on someone, but there’s just something about the perfect symmetry of his face that could do with some roughing up.
Her machine blares in completion, soon after, and Mona is on the move again. The noise sounds as a beacon to anyone who can hear it, so she can’t risk lingering if the killer decides to snoop around. She hasn’t heard the telltale signs of someone being pursued (screaming and wailing echoing from everywhere), which at this point in the match was odd. Another machine blares from one of the far corners, so it’s a better time than any to cut across the central path.
Mona hates this forested setting for reasons beyond its false sky. The squelching of wet dirt under her shoes is cringeworthy enough on its own, if not made worse by the buzzing of electricity and flies and whatever other vermin squirms through the rotting walls of this place. The humidity, too, grows to a point of disorienting when coming upon where she is—it’s a horrible place to traverse, much less to be hunted in. Better to cross it now than later, and she’s sure someone else will have the same idea.
The swamp is expansive and waist-deep—deep enough that going through it is possible, but it's an infuriatingly sluggish traipse all the same. It’s too wide to go around, and too often before has she been caught on its border. Distracting herself with a plan is the only solace amidst the cold, sloshing water weighing down her every step.
Get to the cabins, try to warm up… there’s typically a machine on this end, so positioning oneself near a pallet would be ideal—
A scream rips across the water and Mona’s breath goes right along with it. That was the strangled cry of someone knocked out of their second wind, sprawled and crawling on the ground as an insect would. Survivors, of course, were lesser beings—the insects were small enough to escape. There was nowhere for the helpless to crawl and hide, but Mona could. She had to, if she didn’t want to become the next pursuit.
There’s a struggling, whimpering sound that drags closer to the edge of the swamp, and a set of shackles strung up against a nearby tree clacking like a death knell. Mona looks up at the false stars through the gnarled, engulfing swamp trees and curses them as she plunges into the water.
There’s a certain agony in being able to hear what happens. The swamp is thick and the sludge of it is all too familiar against the back of her throat—what she experienced countless times before keeps her lips and eyes firmly shut now, but senses are only ever amplified in the absence of others.
The noises always follow a pattern. It doesn’t matter who the killer is; or who the survivor is, or what hunting grounds they’re situated in, because the end of it is always the same. The earth rumbles with the imposing sort of steps she could never take, and the body is hefted up and chained. The unlucky victim isn’t begging or pleading for release, which is something one learns to give up on quite quickly in this cycle—she’s sobbing, though, and she’s clearly trying to keep quiet about it. Mona would’ve been able to hear it regardless; it’s hard not to listen for it when she’s been on the receiving end herself more times than she could count.
Sometimes, they make noises too. A killer may deign to laugh at the prey they’ve so easily strung up as game meat, while others might not waste their breath on such triviality. It’s not often that they linger, and this is the one thing Mona believes they all have in common—the night is fickle, and to remain idle is a punishment all its own.
She can hear breathing.
It’s a soft sound, and it’s almost human enough to fool her, but there’s something… conscious about it, like an actor reciting lines. The husk of it is almost permeating, and it seems to pulse in time with her hammering heartbeat. She was seen. She was found out, she’s going to be dragged out by her hair kicking and screaming and pinned down and it’s so, so loud—
Then it’s completely gone, and she has to bite her tongue to hold down her shock. Mona forces herself to wait a few extra moments until emerging, and there’s nothing waiting to force her back down. There’s just the darkness flickering in the far recesses of the treeline, and a friend of hers strung up and threatening to be swallowed by it.
Mona has conferred with the other brilliant minds here about the chains, before. At first glance, the bindings are just the same as any other mundane alloy from the real world, but to be actively wound in them instantly dispels any such pretense. The constriction of them was a most slithering, vile and cold sting, digging in to the point of skin warping red and blue beyond the pulse of one’s wrists in their ears. The pain is a motivator, in the earlier phases of the match, but it only takes so long for the adrenaline to wane.
The Abyss always knows when it wanes. It can smell depleted ambition, and laps it up with the scratching tongue of a beast—it laps and laps until there’s nothing left of you for anyone to rescue, and then you’re spirited away as if it were all a surreal nightmare.
Mona has seen it before, helpless and forced to watch on in the past, and when that crawling darkness swallows someone whole she can feel a phantom lurch in her own bones. That’s been her before. That’ll be her again. It won’t be Sucrose now.
“Thank you, Mona,” she winces as the cuffs are hastily clicked off, “H-he just came out of nowhere. I promise I was paying attention.”
Mona can sympathize with her plight. Sucrose was in an odd intermediary state, as a survivor—she wasn’t new, but she certainly wasn’t experienced. Survival is in the hands of their teammates as much as it is for themselves, and people are never inclined to stick their necks out unless it’s worth it in the long run. Sometimes, it’s those selfish ones who claim victory. That sort of victory is a hollow, useless thing she wants no part of.
Mona can see a cabin nearby—it’s one of the ones she was hoping to stop in along the way. She nods toward it, and Sucrose understands her meaning. Of them two, the alchemist was better suited for healing, but Mona’s slower pace would at least give them the chance to swap intelligence. Whatever fires might flicker inside would also hopefully do something for her sopping clothes.
“You mentioned the killer was a he?”
Her wounds tell their own story, too. The lacerations on her back are thin, but… unnervingly precise, despite the thick sweater she wore. It doesn’t take a closer look to realize there’s some internal bleeding going on, and it's quite unlike any infliction she’s seen from other killers they’ve faced—the cuts lack the jaggedness of the Foul Legacy’s blades, nor did they swell or burn at the edges, which meant it couldn’t be that Crimson Witch’s handiwork either. The Knave might fit the bill, but she didn’t match Sucrose’s description. She winces as Mona applies the disinfectant.
“Well, I kind of just assumed it was a man,” she mumbles, “he never spoke, but when I was ambushed he had a certain husk to his voice. It was just an approximation.”
Mona nods, taking care not to let her hands linger. “I see… Did you get a good look at him?”
“Not really. The chase was between all those dark trees, and all I really managed to see before you rescued me was some kind of mask.”
A mask. That doesn’t really narrow it down—nearly all of the killers wear masks. From context clues, at least, Mona can deduce that he’s some sort of stealthy ambush predator—
“Your illustrious Prinzessin has also keenly deduced that our assailant is a trapper!”
Sucrose jolts nearly a foot up into the air, and the loud boom of the declaration likewise makes Mona flinch back rather vividly. She curses not keeping a better eye on the door—her focus must’ve been especially bad if Fischl of all people was able to sneak up on them. She can hear the faintest flapping of wings, which means that crow… (raven?) familiar she’s tamed is keeping watch. His loyalty to the ‘Prinzessin’ as a wild animal was as abnormal as it was reliable. They can rest a little easier with him as a scout.
Mona gives her a look she knows all too well—keep your blasted voice down—and sharply motions her closer to finish bandaging Sucrose. Fischl huffs, but obliges, because Mona’s never steered her wrong before.
“Oz, my dearest augur of truth amidst this wicked, malicious darkness, has made a discovery. Behold.”
Mona squints down at what she’s got clutched between her fingers. She almost mistakes them for wires, at first, but they seem much too slender for that. They gleam something between violet and indigo, and looking at them under the wrong angle leaves them entirely invisible to the naked eye. They almost seem to curl in Fischl’s hands, as if retaining some impulse to bind and constrain even once severed from their source.
She’s never seen anything like them before. The silence around them is thick as she swallows around the lump in her throat.
“…Archmage Megistus,” Fischl clears her throat, “your Prinzessin would be… appreciative of your counsel on this matter.”
Her voice is entirely too small for everything she boasts. Sucrose, too, seems to shrink at the notion of Mona’s uncertainty. Of the four of them here, she was the one with the most experience—they were counting on her for direction, instructions, anything, and she didn’t know if that was something she could give them.
But she didn’t have a choice, did she? For everything she had to determine in the spur of the moment, there was still so, so much beyond her control. They were all her responsibility, and she had to try.
“Sucrose, you’ll need to lay low until we’ve completed a few more machines. It’s over for you if you get locked in a pursuit again. Fischl, I trust you and Oz to carry out rescues as needed… and keep in mind that there’s a new survivor on our team for this match.” She wrinkles her nose in mild distaste. “His name is Scaramouche, and he’s… abrasive. If you see him, don’t let him goad you. It’s distracting.”
The girls nod, and Mona wants to believe that she can see determination reflected in their eyes from the fire. They know better than to linger without cause, filing out with haste after a brief exchange of well wishes, leaving Mona alone in the mouth of the cabin.
She took the strings from Fischl before she left, if only to get a closer look at them. They crackle with static for every movement of her thumb smoothing them out, and while it doesn’t hurt, it does provide some insight into their function. Immobilization, if she had to guess—keeping an eye out for these between pallets or doorways would be just as vital as watching for the one who laid them there.
They twitch as her fingers curl into fists around them, like strangled things. She almost thinks she can hear them shriek as she throws them onto the fire, but she pays them no mind. There were matters of greater importance to attend, and so help her, they’d all be coming out of it alive.
It’s only when she’s nearly done with the next machine that she notices the bleeding.
“What the…”
The cuts trace the lines of her palm to each individual crease. They web out into the tips of her fingers, and they’re… fresh. She hadn’t even felt the sting of them until now, actually looking at them, and they only seem to bead with blood at her own realization. She flexes her palm and the centermost gash folds into itself as she winces. How did this happen? She’s been injured by the machines before, but the gravest offense among those were mild electrical burns, never something like…
“Oh. That doesn’t look so good, Mona Megistus.”
Mona flinches back, because Scaramouche is immediately beside her. He snickers faintly, as if knowing he isn’t the only one to give her such a fright, this match. She curses under her breath, because even if he insists on not being helpful, Mona has a responsibility to their team. This isn’t going to slow her down.
“I’m fine,” she grumbles, assuming her position at the machine once more, “and I’d appreciate it if you weren’t hovering about and blathering, this time.”
Mona resumes punching into the keys, albeit with a bit more force than she’s used to. The static prickles more insistently than it has, before, and the jolt of it that’s always been subdued by the callouses of her hand can’t help her now. The machine almost short circuits, but the cry she lets out as she stretches her fingers out to stop it is just loud enough to turn the killer’s head to their location. She winces, but doesn’t allow herself to cradle it for longer than a moment.
Scaramouche’s own hand wraps around her wrist before she can think to protest it. His yank is something between insistent and… something else, that she might be inclined to call restraint. He pries her hand open and peers into the wound silently for several seconds.
“…Give me your bandages.”
When she doesn’t immediately hand over her med kit, he makes a grab for it, fumbling around the clasps until he’s got a roll of them in his hands. Scaramouche forces her to sit against a rock as he works, tactfully disinfecting the wounds before sealing them up. Mona holds her breath all the while, and finds herself holding it still even after he retracts. She’s been staring up at the sky, she realizes—looking for something that once brought her comfort. She can feel him follow her gaze.
“I don’t think they’re real.”
Mona sighs. She knows.
“…Thanks,” she winces after a moment, flexing her palm. The bandages are nearly tight enough to border on suffocating, but that he thought to tend to her at all was a surreal experience. So often it was that Mona was fretting over everyone else, so it was up to her to push down any personal pains. Scaramouche seems to notice her discomfort anyhow, chuckling.
”Sorry. The Abyss didn’t take me for my survival skills, it seems.”
She tries to stand, but Scaramouche stops her again, taking her place in front of the machine. He studies it with something unto intrigue, which almost makes her chuckle, too.
“And why did it take you, hm?”
He hums. “My sense of humour, perhaps.”
He reaches out to flick one of the dials with all of the confidence of someone who has no idea what he’s doing. Mona leans over conspicuously, pointing to an adjacent cord.
“You have to pull that cord to get it started. That dial there is for when the machine overheats, but the one next to it is to track the frequency.”
Scaramouche stares at her blankly. “The… frequency. Right.”
Mona sighs and pushes herself up, pointing him forward and positioning herself from behind. This is a teaching moment, no matter how infuriating, and he needs to learn how to operate the cipher if he’s going to survive. It’s a purely professional interaction, but there’s… something about wrapping her hands around his to guide his motions. His skin is entirely covered by the dark of his sleeves and gloves, but it’s hard, and not even the layers soften the stiffness. She continues nevertheless.
“Now, while the machine is running, you’ll use this slider to periodically adjust the antenna,” she guides his finger to tap against the surface of it, “and the higher the frequency is, the faster you can work. Understand?”
Scaramouche hasn’t said anything since she started touching him. That stiffness couldn’t be nervousness, could it? He was more than keen to handle her, earlier, so that was… improbable. Hypocrisy didn’t seem entirely off the table for the sort of personality he was presenting, though.
His fingers flex until they’re entwined with hers. She can feel her skin heat up from everywhere they touch, and he seems to feel it, too. The fabric of his clothes are unnervingly cold in contrast.
“I don’t think I do understand. You might have to explain in more detail.”
She’s trembling. It’s not from fear, and that in of itself is unnerving—she hasn’t trembled like this since before she… No. No distractions.
“Look, Scaramouche, you need to be taking this a lot more seriously. As a team, we—”
“H-help!”
Sucrose barrels through the thicket, hands clutching her chest as if to ease her heavy breathing. There’s a terror in her eyes that goes far deeper than what Mona saw when she had first been strung up. She unhands Scaramouche immediately, rushing to prop her up against the stone instead. She doesn’t notice Scaramouche flexing his fingers at the loss.
“Fischl got chained a f-few dozen meters from here… I tried to go rescue her, but I… I got wound up in those strings. I wasn’t paying attention, I-I’m so—”
Mona hushes her gently and surveys her wounds. They’re far nastier than what she herself sustained, and those red lines seem to streak from her legs to her arms and even up to her face. She’s not sure she has enough supplies to fully tend to all of them, but she has to try.
Scaramouche is between them before she can blink.
“She has some supplies. I’ll heal her up while you go rescue Fischl.”
Mona is surprised by the initiative, but more so by the glimmer of imploring authenticity in his voice. There’s something about a moment of crises that can either bring out the best or worst in someone, and this seemed to be one such ultimatum. Her insight is of no use under a false sky, but his earnest offer ignites a certain satisfaction in her. He had undermined himself, but the Abyss did take him for a reason—it took all of them for a reason, and the capability it was trying to cull would only become its downfall, so long as they stuck together. She’s glad he realizes that a bit better.
Mona nods to them both before setting off. Words could wait until they were all well enough for them, and Fischl… she was normally swift enough to evade capture, so this was especially disconcerting. Every step towards her is hastened by this sinking, itching feeling at the back of her head that something is horribly wrong. Everything feels like it's progressing too fast and entirely too slow, and the pump of adrenaline is making a monster of every crooked tree she passes.
Rescue Fischl, regroup and complete that cipher if Sucrose hadn’t by that point—then, move on to the last one. Perhaps somebody’s started a machine that has some progress on it already. Everything will be okay.
Mona enters a clearing near where one of two exit gates stands. It’s a cruel mockery to even have bindings this far out, dangling the impossibility of escape in a victim’s face, but Fischl’s position was far crueller than any of that. Nearly all the blood drains from her face at the sight.
“Fischl!”
Her head crooks up at the call of her name. Or what’s left of it. She’s submerged in the Abyss up to her neck, and her arms look so thin that they could very well slip through the cuffs, but Mona knows full well that she doesn’t have the strength to pull herself out. Even if she were to help, she might just dislocate something and leave her in even more pain before the darkness took her completely.
It’s useless to stay if she can’t perform a rescue. She should turn around and hike it to a machine, ensuring this sacrifice wasn’t in vain— but Mona reaches to undo the bindings anyway. The fate of a fallen survivor was a wicked and unjust thing, but she would do everything she could now to ensure it passed painlessly. That was her responsibility, as one of fate’s former emissaries. She holds her hand, and Fischl almost squeezes her back.
“He’s not,” she croaks, “n-not… not on our…”
She slips further, and Mona squeezes harder. No, she was being stupid, she could still try to pull her out, she could pull her out and it wouldn’t be her fault—
“…Sorry, Mona.”
Her eyes slip closed and the earth swallows her up, and Mona is holding nothing. She may as well be nothing. She couldn’t do the one thing she was supposed to, she couldn’t keep this poor girl alive, what good was she to anyone—
There’s a cawing over her head that startles Mona out of the spiral immediately. She almost got dragged down with her—the Abyss was a cunning enemy, and Oz seemed to recognize this all too well. He stares down at her with beady little eyes that reflected something only Fischl could see before spreading his wings and flying off into the treeline. Mona’s unsure how he’s able to follow her, but he always finds a way back to her side. It must be nice.
Something flutters down from the branch he perched upon, and Mona squints before stumbling to pinch it between her fingers. The shape of it dawns on her with an unsettling clarity.
It’s… a maple leaf.
Something that’s almost a scream rips across the forest before being strangled shut. Mona’s heart sinks, and her feet carry her back the way she came before she can think to move otherwise.
The leaf crunches in her hand, ephemeral and scattered to the wind; much like the one it once belonged to, she imagines. Tokens like these were cherished amongst their ilk, and considered by some to be as vital as a med kit—their appearances were sporadic in matches, and not even she could rationalize why the Abyss might give a person their memory in pieces like this, but there was no mistaking the mark of individuality this one bore.
A maple leaf. Acer Palmatum. This belonged to her friend, Kazuha, which meant that he was in this game somewhere.
Mona. Sucrose. Fischl… and Kazuha.
Sucrose isn’t anywhere when she emerges back into the clearing, but there’s one less set of bindings on the tree, and the word “new” takes on a far more terrifying meaning.
Scaramouche’s back is to her. The cipher standing next to him, the one that had once been moments away from completion, is unrecognizable—both its mail panel up to the tip of its antenna is wrapped in those violet strings, and staring at them only makes her bandaged hand burn hotter. He’s not facing her, but raises a hand for her to stop. From the way he leans against his handiwork with that lazy flick of the wrist, it’s obvious he’s very pleased with himself.
“One moment,” he hums, “I’m trying to imagine what you look like right now.”
They’re both very still, save for his fingers, which flex into the open air as if to grasp and savour the thickness in the air. She can’t begin to fathom what kind of outrage is twisting her expression, but it seems to spark the tension in the air until it crackles like electricity. Something likewise crackles in his palm as he turns, so, so slowly, and his face…
It’s the same. It’s the same as every other time they’ve met, this match, and beholding this beauty now feels unnatural and sickening. What he has schooled into a neutral expression splits into a grin that’s too out of place with his delicate features. It reaches his eyes in a way it hadn’t before, alight with something so gleefully inhuman that it freezes her in place as they roam over her. Scaramouche laughs.
“Oh, that’s even better than I thought. You’re quite an expressive woman, Mona—it made this little game of play-pretend well worth it.” He tilts his head. “Perhaps I should reward you… an inquisitive mind like yours wants answers, right? Ask me something interesting, and maybe I’ll give you a headstart.”
All of his other words are muted noise. A game. A little game, that’s all this was to him. A little game with their lives on the line that she helped him to win.
“Who are you?”
It’s spoken with more despondence than she intended. Scaramouche clicks his tongue.
“Really? How redundant. You know who I am.” He almost sounds disappointed by her question as he leisurely approaches, producing something sharp from nowhere to hold under the veins of her neck. Moving now would be as much of a death wish as staying still, but she can’t bring herself to even think of it now.
“But you, Mona Megistus… I’ve been looking forward to learning who you are. The others were harping on about some formidable astrologist who would see through me in a second… ah, well. You were more entertaining than that descendant of the Raiden Goukaden, at least.”
He had to be talking about Kazuha. So he was already… For him to be eliminated so early, to mess with her perceptions like this… Scaramouche must’ve been especially lethal, when he wasn’t playing with his food. A hot seed of rage blooms on her tongue at being so utterly reduced.
“Yes, I know perfectly well who you are,” and perhaps he wasn’t expecting her to speak up, for the bob of her throat against what she now perceives as a blade seems to itch as she did, “you’re a h-heartless traitor—”
The blade curves down to cuff Mona’s shoulder. She hisses at the sting, watching as her blood joins with that of her companions against the hungry, glistening sheen of it. Scaramouche looks rather pleased to have provoked her.
“You’re entirely correct, astrologist. But do you want to know what I’m not?” The edge of it trails ever so slowly down to the collar of her shirt, swirling around one of the buttons. His other hand snakes around Mona’s waist and draws it into his.
“I’m not someone who wastes their capability on weak links. That’s why you’ve lost.”
How ironic that she considered him to be one such link, before. A link she had vouched for and trusted and left alone with her teammates at their most vulnerable. She casts one final glance up to the cold, immutable stars, and they finally convey a single truth—she’s lost far more than just this match, tonight.
Scaramouche breathes into the hollow of her neck, just as cold, and Mona recoils in an instant. He laughs heartily before drawing back himself, weighing his blade in his hand. He traces its edge until his pointer finger is tacky with her blood, and if she didn’t know any better, he seems to revel in it.
“Nothing more to say?”
Mona steels herself. “I pray the Abyss punishes you for every rule you broke here.”
He smiles and shakes his head, as if he pities her. “Then I’ll make sure to send you ahead of me to beg for forgiveness.”
He reaches for the white rim of what she had been flippantly curious of some time ago. His eyes twinkle with some kind of vicious humour before they’re engulfed by the shadow of his mask, pale as bone and engraved with something that almost gives it a mechanical sheen. There’s a pattern that she could almost mistake for tear stains, running down the sides of it from the thing’s red eyes. With it obscuring his face against the black of his cloak, he looks every bit the phantom Sucrose presumed him to be.
His fingers twitch as if they, too, are wound around strings she cannot see.
“…Ten. Nine…”
Ice floods her veins and she’s gone in an instant. Tearing through the trees so recklessly would be a death wish at any other time, but there was nowhere Mona could hide that he wouldn’t find her as he did before. She can feel the breath of his countdown on the nape of her neck, the ceaseless ticking of a clock that reverberates through anything that remains of her human mind. All that she knows is the primitive urge to run—run and live, live for everyone who can’t because of you—
A rush of cold air sobers her, but Mona can’t bring herself to stop moving. She breathes through it, scraping her brain for any memory of where the hatch might appear. It was an anomalous passage that led to the same end as an open gate, as well as her final chance of escape as the sole survivor—and a hope that was often quashed by a triumphant killer. She would have to claim her own sort of vicious triumph, now, if such a thing were possible.
Mona weaves around the foliage and steps around the shards of glass from the broken bottles littering the floor around the cabins. All of it feels like a half-wrong imitation of what a forest should be, but she’s long past dwelling on the eeriness. The hatch could be anywhere from the centre of this place to the very edge of its perimeter, so her search needed to be swift and decisive. Working her way in from there was a viable strategy, but not one for someone with so little time. Scaramouche was most definitely on her trail by now, so she couldn’t afford delay.
There was nothing near the campfires, nor the swamp or the cabins (save for some distasteful bits of string hanging from the doorways). She can’t be sure how much or how little time has passed, but her memory is completely tapped. She hasn’t been the last one alive in so long, but there’s still one place she hasn’t checked.
Surely it… couldn’t be in the basement? Getting dragged down and chained up in a place like that was damning to ensure no one would attempt rescue. Each of the Abyss’s settings had an area like it, with a narrow access point and many shadowy corners for a killer to stage an ambush. That it could appear there would be a horrible twist of irony, but it's also her only remaining option.
The false stars seem to gleam in robotic synchronicity as the mouth of the stairwell comes into view. Are they urging her on, perhaps? Or trying to warn her? They bear no loyalty to her as the true sky once did, but Mona still can’t help but heed their glow. She despises them, but the part of herself she still wants to call an astrologist wants to believe there’s something true beneath it all.
The tree beside her splinters with a sickening crack that almost makes her shriek. There’s a long, serrated blade lodged into the bark, and the one who threw it has her pinned to the trunk just as swiftly.
“That certainly didn’t take long.”
His voice takes on an echoing tone under that mask, something that sounds like the sting of a raw cut on cold metal. He’s so much larger when he’s looming, the rough edge of his glove holding her face as he grips and squeezes and the skin bulges blue—
She kicks him in the groin, falling to the sodden ground with a choking sort of gasp. Her fingers curl into the earth blindly until they find purchase around something thematically fitting. Glass didn’t belong in the dirt, and a killer didn’t belong in her good graces. Mona feels her palm slice open on the cluster of them, but its a small price to pay in throwing them up into his face. It’s little more than a vain distraction, but it does the job, and she's able to scramble away by the skin of her teeth.
The descent to the basement is hurried and sloppy. The stairs are narrow and Mona hasn’t had feeling in her legs since this “hunt” began—each stumble and scrape is unforgiving against the cold stone, but she doesn’t have another choice but to drag herself through it. This is her last chance to be something beyond a failure to her team, and the open mouth of the hatch is bidding her closer.
When Mona tries to stand, something splinters in her leg and she cries. She buckles over to the floor and heaves there for a single breath before reaching out and dragging her screaming body towards the end.
A set of languid footsteps echo down the stairwell. Mona tastes blood from where her face hit the wall earlier, and she struggles not to spit it up. The footsteps grow louder. She sobs in frustration, pulling and pushing and rubbing herself raw in increasingly desperate motions before—
She’s there. She’s there, she’s half there, and she just needs to tip the other half of herself in and hope the dark of it all will muffle the pain. A boot stamps into the small of her back and every one of those hopes goes up in smoke.
“This wasn’t as fun of a chase as I thought it’d be.” Scaramouche nudges her to splay out on her back, staring up into the dingy basement light as it flares against the pale parts of his mask. Her lungs feel like they’ve been crushed under their own weight, so she’s amazed that she can wheeze anything out, bitter and raspy as she sounds.
“We finally… ghh, agree on something.”
Scaramouche stares at her for several long seconds (at least, she thinks so) before he barks out a laugh that sounds like the glass she threw in his face. Without warning, his body drops to straddle her waist.
“Still trying to find common ground, after everything? Hm…” His blade glides over her skin, lightly teasing the edges of whatever’s bloodied and exposed. He seems to be considering something with each slow, drawn out bit of attention he lavishes onto his handiwork.
“I’m sure you already know this, but the Abyss demands a certain kind of sacrifice.” Her fingers flex beyond her control, like fish flailing in the open air. His own hands move to trace the shape of her protruding collar. “It takes something more valuable than life each time you’re strung up… but I think I’m a bit more selfish than the Abyss. I want my own little sacrifice.”
He’s entirely too close to her face, and his words leave her entirely sallow. Such arrogation would doom anyone else, but here, his ambition was a feast to the Abyssal powers that be. That she, or any of her friends could reflect something similar to deserve this fate makes her want to vomit. Mona feels herself flush with something vile.
“Go fuck yourself,” she spits, “and just chain me already.”
Scaramouche hums decisively. “Next time, perhaps. If you pray to me in that darkness, I’ll make sure we meet like this again.”
He lifts the corner of his mask, and it retracts back into the shadow of his hood. His face is as eerily flawless as ever, and yet the glinting amusement in his eyes makes him look just as human as she once assumed him to be. She’s not sure what he is, anymore. When he reaches for the hand he bandaged, injured by his own design and jerking it as if she were a puppet on a string, leaves her knowing even less.
Scaramouche presses a rough, insistent kiss into the center of her palm, and she feels his lips so deeply that it almost borders on obsessive. His eyes glint with that unnatural light, wide as the moon to capture every inch of her revulsion. Mona feels a twitch of… something else amidst it, but he doesn’t seem to realize. That, or he suddenly grew a conscience along with that twitching grin.
“Thank you for the warm welcome. We’ll see each other later… Mona Megistus.”
Everything is weightless all at once. She’s been pushed off the edge, tumbling and flailing into a different kind of darkness than she’d been anticipating. The turmoil settles with her heart, eventually, and Mona almost seems to float against the panic that had seized her. It turns her in its hands as if she were a helpless babe, and looking up into the diminishing rays of light from the hatch is like gazing into a sliver of the true sky. The stars pour through the narrowness like water, and no binding ties could hold Mona back from reaching for it. She reaches until the stars fade and the light bleeds violet and she’s back where she always begins—unscathed and alone and awakened from a bad dream.
Mona rises, shuddering through her breath as the darkness recedes. She’s no longer in the forest, but the sky is as false as it’s ever been. If some “new” truth could yet splinter it… perhaps seeing him again wouldn’t be such a bad thing, after all.