Zaldizko - Chapter 13 First Tier

My teeth chattered profusely that I was worried I would end up with droopy cheeks like Bulldog’s from my bone chipping off.

“C-Cold.” I wrapped my arms around myself to keep my body as warm as possible.

However, nothing was going to keep me warm when I was surrounded by the hollowed-eye ghost welcoming committee and their icy cloud.

_”Use the salt sh-shaker.”_ Even Leinard’s telepathy was affected by the cold.

My hands shook as I fiddled around the belt pouch and, with Small Caps assistance, I was able to get a hold of the salt shaker container.

I was grateful that the thing was made of wood. The burning sensation of my palms was tolerable.

Many ghost hands reached for our vital organs, especially for our hearts.

Leinard’s mouth became blue and immovable, preventing him from uttering a spell.

I sidled up to him to steal some of his body warmth, so I could force myself to lift the weight of my arms. I raised the shaker to the hollowed-eye ghosts.

_”Come on… SHAKE!”_

I pressed through my splintering pain to shake out clouds of salt that vanquished the ghosts upon impact. It also caused a brute force that sent me and Leinard flying through the corridor and tumbling about a platform of glowing moonstone upon our landing.

“What’s g-going on?” Leinard had managed to burr his question to the floor as he pushed himself up.

We gasped at the sight of the hexagon shaped platform we had found ourselves on. Hissing steam came out of the copper piping that ran its edges, which thawed some of my body, so I could move more freely.

In the center was an arrangement of gold coins spinning about the air. They formed the shape of an enormous olive tree with branches of dark-gold light linking other glowing moonstone hexagon platforms that ran circles in the air meters above our heads. The tree’s gold-light roots pierced through the floor. I noticed endpoints of black tunnels were stationary at all the platforms. A cloudy grey space sporadically lit up with electrostatic flashes and pulses.

“Not what you expected is it Lieutenant Colonel?” said a strange yet familiar voice.

I pushed myself up and came face to face with Death. He was wearing the Gat Shiem sackcloth tunic, long pants and straw sandals like the one that hollow-eyed version wore. Something else was inside my brother judging by the arrogant smirk on his face and the way his hands rested, childishly, on his hips.

“Who are you?” I blurted the question and received a condescending finger wag for a response.

“Are you Death?” Leinard had coolly rephrased my question.

“My, my, you boys are too impatient; always wanting to cut to the chase.” Death’s impostor skirted around our questions and approached Leinard, so their noses touched.

“This body’s super sexy is it not? So fit and fair skinned with lots of virility, but nowhere to offload it.” Death’s impostor licked his plump lips and took a few steps back.

“I’m sorry, but this body doesn’t yearn for the stoic macho type. Isn’t that right, Famine?”

I gasped at the iridescent shimmer of Death’s blue eyes. Was he being controlled?

_”No possessed.”_ Leinard corrected me.

It made sense and I felt there was some hope; if only I could kick that foul thing out of him.

First, I needed to know what demon we were facing.

“Who are you?” I repeated my question and stiffened with discomfort when Possessed Death yanked me into a suggestive hug and licked my neck.

“Stop it! Yuck, get off me!” I yelled and struggled, and was released with a jerky push.

I tensed when Possessed Death’s hand wrapped his own neck with threats of strangulation.

My heart picked up in beat with a hope that my real brother was still alive in there and fighting against the thing that had taken a hold over him.

Possessed Death bellowed with laughter and relaxed his hand. Had it been a joke?

“You seriously believe that your brother is conscious in this body?” Possessed Death resumed his cocky stance and expression of arrogance.

“Then again, you’re the dumb one. Honestly, that Hades Lion screwed up my calculations.”

“Sheesh, what’s with these demons dissing me?” I sighed. “Hades Lion?”

I recalled the juxtapositioner demon saying a similar thing when we had fought him.

Possessed Death let out a spoilt child’s rant on being duped.

“I did everything according to plan. Here I end up with the wrong set of brothers! Honestly, that just will not do!”

“What do you mean?” I questioned and gasped at the ghostly hand that was burning an icy ring around my throat.

From the corner of my eye, I saw our bodies surrounded by hollowed-eye ghosts.

It seemed Possessed Death was controlling these creatures too.

“Trash don’t speak.” Possessed Death directed a proper response to me.

Strangled noises escaped my throat as I felt the burning around my neck block off my airways.

The temperature of the platform had dropped to sub-zero, gradually making my skin numb and blue.

“You’re a… hiruda…?” Leinard wheezed with frosty breaths.

I felt my strangulation ease, so I was able to breathe and took some time to recover as much of my strength as possible even with the icy hand still wrapped around my throat.

Leinard rushed through a quick fact sheet of what a hiruda was in my mind.

It was a parasitic demon belonging to the Night Vamprous genus, which depended on a meat suitflesh-based bodyand that suit’s chi to survive since its own form was weak and subject to elemental and light-based attacks.

Once it hooked itself up to the central nervous system of a powerful host, it was a formidable foe. Especially since it also carried over its knowledge from former bodies into the current host.

As much I knew my brother, there was no telling what access to additional power the body before me was capable of.

Death was the only one of us who had magical abilities, which was charged by his keen empathy that he was able to master.

It was the reason Shuso had chosen him for cataloguing artefacts in the archives. He was able to identify the magic and signatures contained within objects.

“Crap,” I spat out.

We were a hair’s breadth away from being kaput.

“What to do? I really need the older Aueralius, hmm,” Possessed Death mumbled his thoughts and faced us with a ‘light bulb’ moment.

_”You’re the younger one?”_ I thought with surprise.

_”I receive that reaction a lot,”_ Leinard replied stoically in thought.

“You have a candle, don’t you?” Possessed Death said to Leinard in a chirpy manner.

“Don’t know what you’re on about,” Leinard bravely answered.

He coughed from the ghostly hand that squeezed his neck, making his face go blue.

“There are two things that will make you see your end faster boy! Lying and bad sarcasm,” Possessed Death dramatically scolded Leinard.

“In Trash’s case, add bad fashion to the list.” He cast a funny look my way. “Honestly, didn’t anyone tell you that a red bow tie makes you stand out like one big Tomato? This isn’t fox-bot hunting season too, yanno!”

I growled in response and received a tighter hold around my neck allowing only enough windpipe to breathe.

“Now.” Possessed Death sucked in a depth breath as he plunged his hand into Leinard’s pockets to search for the candle, and slowly exhaled with a cheesy grin.

“Oops, I guess I should be careful not to damage these,” he giggled when his hand had felt up a bit of groin based on the queasy reaction from Leinard’s face.

“Here it is!” he triumphantly declared when he pulled out the remaining piece of the church candle, which had been taken from the second sitting room back at the fake headquarters.

“Now, normally one would need a mirror to perform a dimension slip.” Possessed Death had put on a professor’s voice. “Not to be mistaken for an Arima Trap that is only good for containing, which I bet you boys cleverly thought you were in.”

“Alas, no mirrors.” He faked his disappointment.

“Sheesh, you’re annoying,” I hissed through my weakened breath.

“You know, this piece of trash is really starting to bug me.” Possessed Death frowned.

I yelped when the ghostly hand around my neck swung my body with brute force and sent me flying across the other side of the platform.

I landed near a stationary opening of a black tunnel that was previously out of my view.

My arm felt broken, barely able to sit up from the pain, but I could breathe properly again. I thanked my lucky stars that the toss hadn’t left me with a broken neck.

Leinard soon followed, falling to the floor with a heavy thump and his hand rubbing at this head.

“Fortunately, this body was well cared for and brimming with an alchemist’s wet dream of knowledge from Gat Shiem. Knowledge not known anywhere else in Sol,” Possessed Death said as he approached us.

I noticed Leinard’s body tense when Possessed Death pointed out a large amount of gold spinning about the center that made up the olive tree and a big clear quartz shard lying on the ground not too far from where we both were thrown.

Leinard noted, in my mind, that the quartz would have been the hiruda’s prison, which it had somehow managed to escape.

“So, let’s get this little chemistry experiment underway, shall we?” Possessed Death cackled madly as he grabbed a handful of the gold coins and laid them to the ground next to Leinard whose head and limbs were bound tightly by many hands from hollowed-eye ghosts.

The platform tremored with a threat of tipping us over the edge. I sighed when the floor eased, and gulped down a nervous knot when the hiruda called upon a fire spell to burn the gold down to liquid. He pressed the flat end of the large clear quartz shard firmly to the gold puddle, so the other flat part of the shard was facing up and a reflection could be seen. A mirror was made.

“Now look into the mirror my lovely and call out your brother’s true name,” said Possessed Death as he lit the candle and forced blood from Leinard’s finger by cutting it against a sharp edge of the shard.

Leinard cried out as he desperately fought against the hollowed-eye ghosts that were keeping his face fixed to the mirror. He closed his eyes and had cold fingers burn his lids, so they reflectively opened.

“Don’t look away, lest you want this body to be grieving over the loss of his younger, dumb, brother,” Possessed Death warned.

He repeated the ritual we had performed earlier by smearing Leinard’s blood and the melted wax to the quartz mirror. “Call out his name.”

“No,” Leinard spat out.

“I’ll kill Famine.”

My face was going hot and blue from the hands that were strangling me. The pain I felt to my eyes was making my thoughts scramble into a panic. It hurt. I could barely see, and my ears began ringing loudly as a burning feeling was threatening to make my head explode.

“Do it!” Possessed Death shouted with seriousness.

“Don’t” I hissed pitifully and almost choked on my breath that wasn’t able to come out of my throat. I felt the corners of my lips and my jaw soaked with spittle.

I closed my eyes when I heard Leinard call out Trix’s name three times and opened them when I felt my neck released, so I could catch my breath.

“Ha! He comes,” Possessed Death gloated with a madman’s laugh when Trix’s image swam into focus on the mirror.

He pressed his hand to the surface and muttered a spell, and as he gradually retracted his hand, he had successfully sucked Trix into our dimension through a shimmering mirror portal that had been rebounded off the quartz’s surface as a prism would bounce rays of rainbow light into the air.

He moved the shard to one side to close the portal upon Trix’s entry.

He didn’t realise the knight wasn’t alone until he saw his hand was gripping the arm of another man who wore the navy-blue garb of an Evadale Knight.

Both men dropped, unconscious, to the ground near us.

“Goddammit! Why can’t you people ever be alone?! Why wasn’t he with War?!” Possessed Death ranted and childishly stamped his feet to the ground.

_”Colin Treinaton,”_ Leinard said in my mind.

My attention went back to Possessed Death’s rant, which had become louder and more annoying.

“I WANT WAR! Is it too much to ask?” He finished his rant with a deep sigh and flashed me a snarky look. “Well, I don’t need you anymore, so BE GONE!”