Ex Lacrima Remnant

Track #1 – Au Clair de la Lune

“Target in sight on our eleven. Keep the formation.”

“Aye aye, Commander Primula, sir!”

An enthusiastic nod, coming from all sides. Twenty soldiers in armored suits, their faces obscured by their helmets, opaque visors concealing their identities. You couldn’t choose to become part of the Peacekeeping Corps. The Corps chose you. So, it did no good to any civilian to know who among them was the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Yet, an unmasked exception stood in the middle of the pack, in a blue suit of armor that cannibalized all attention. Hers was the voice that called for order. Hers was the command that moved the agents, like the industrious ants they were. Straight, neck-length hair the color of hay. Eyes like a frozen lake. Pale complexion, almost porcelain-white. And what looked like thin tree roots wrapped around her neck. She lifted her hand, pointed towards a dilapidated building. Ivy had taken it over as its realm, sticking to the concrete, ripping through the paint. Cracks and exposed rebar everywhere, bolted windows, not one door intact. Somewhat not that uncommon of a sight, in that block. The golden age of the harbor entertainment district had come and gone, leaving behind only a hollowed out shell of what once was a luscious neighborhood. A shell that sheltered wanted criminals and societal rejects, of course.

Such as the silhouette standing atop the warehouse, bathed in the stray rays of a gibbous moon.

The blond woman called Primula brushed her hair with her free hand, glanced towards the target. A finger signal, twice. All soldiers nodded in silence, spread around in a well known pattern, something imprinted in their combat DNA, practiced for years. Then, they raised their guns, in almost perfect synchronicity. Silence fell among the troops. The distant noises of cars in the night. The roaring engines of the container ships. The humming of the neon lights, flickering on and off all around the district. Not a word. Not a movement.

Till the order came.

“Fire!”

A concerto of bullets, the ratatatata of the automatic rifles. Ratatata. Ratatata. Primula couldn’t get enough of it. That was a rhythm that moved her heart. Ratatata. Ratatata. A salvo of death. The target gone, shredded to smithereens. A corpse to dispose of. Her promised prize water supply. Next assignment. All like that.

Except, something went off tune. The silhouette. Wasn’t there anymore.

It was.

Jumping.

In the night.

Gliding down.

From the roof of that low building.

Turning in the air.

Avoiding all bullets.

Primula stared in awe for a short instant, finally discerning the details of the dancing shadow. A dark ripped robe with long sleeves, completely open on the legs on both sides, floating like a macabre qipao. No pants, socks or shoes of sorts, bare legs and feet with polished black nails. A hood covered her head, red braids coming out of it like vines, suspended in the air as she fell towards the ground. A blindfold of gauze masked both of her eyes. But not her grin. A grin that made Primula shiver.

But not as much as what the target was carrying in her slender arms.

A black and gold violin – or something that looked like that.

“Target on our two! Group B, take cover! Group A, open fire!”

Primula roared, raised her machete, causing it to shine in the moonlight too. In that moment, the violinist landed with otherworldly grace, right in the middle of the armed group, before a single bullet could be fired. Her legs bent to soften the impact, like springs ready to explode. And, of course, she was still grinning. The soldiers took a step back, their guns aimed, finger on the trigger. Primula’s voice ripped through the night.

“Group A, fall back! Avoid friendly fire!”

They reacted immediately, breaking the encirclement, moving into a pattern with no obstructed lines of sight. Primula felt better about it. If the target jumped again while they shot, her soldiers could have killed each other. That was something she had to avoid at all costs. All for her water. All for her beloved water. She gritted her teeth, as the roots around her neck started to twitch. That wasn’t a good sign – more like an omen of misfortune. She caressed the thin tendrils wrapping her skin, read their vibrations. It was unsettling. Her body was reacting to the simple sight of that strange figure. Yet, she couldn’t go back. It was time to close the hunt.

“Group A, group B! Suppression fire at my command!”

It was then that she noticed it. The violin. The bow lined up on the strings. And the music. Notes. Notes piercing through the air, reverberating in a horrific cacophony. Her roots twitched again, hugged her neck tighter. Suddenly, she understood. With a last second reaction, she let them wrap her head, grow an instant cage to embrace it. The soldiers noticed it too. The music. The elegant, sinuous movement of the bow on the strings, of that hooded, blindfolded violinist with scarlet braids, dancing in front of them in an impromptu show. Primula tried to shout, to overcome the waterfall of notes.

“Lagash take her! Shoot! Now!”

But it was too late.

None of her words would have changed anything.

All started with a pop. Group A’s leader, the closest to the target. His helmet – no, his whole head – inflated in the blink of an eye. Before exploding in a shower of metal and brain matter. Pop. Then, it was the sergeant close to him. Pop. Then the third in command. Then the twins that talked in unison. Pop. Pop. Pop. All their heads bursting, one by one. Primula fell on her knees, her viscera churning inside her, as her bones shook, her muscles vibrated. Pop. Pop. Pop. Here goes Group B’s leader, the gal who offered her a drink, then that muscle head of her second in command. The youngling who joined yesterday too. Pop. Pop. Pop.

Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty pops.

Until none remained.

Except her.

All the headless corpses slumped to the ground, dead before they could even scream or realize what was happening, before they could even feel pain. Primula inhaled. Exhaled. The tendrils freed her head, got back to wrapping her neck alone. Inhaled. Exhaled. Twenty soldiers gone. Dead. A liter of water lost for each, as a price for her failure. Her precious water. Lost. She gritted her teeth, quelled the sobbing before it started. Crying meant losing more water. And that, that was something she couldn’t afford. Slowly, she stood up, gripping her fingers around her machete’s handle. Her icy eyes met the blindfold, the shite-eating, cruel grin of the violinist, still dancing and prancing among the chunks of flesh that were once human beings. The strange girl tilted her head on the side, resting it on the chassis of her instrument of death, aiming the bow at Primula.

“Ha! Ha ha! I see, I see! So you are a rhizome! Your fundamental frequency is all over the place, good call altering your body structure like that! Kudos, kudos from the bottom of my heart! You deserve a cookie!”

Kryzalid. True name: Mimi LeFou. Primula remembered reading about her, about her time in the Corps, even seeing her a couple times around the precinct. Before she turned renegade, that is, after the incident that blinded her. So much data about her past life, so few details about her current predicaments. A paragon of virtue, an exemplary Peacekeeper turned terrorist and mass murderer. Supposed dead and killed by the Corps until the previous week, when she was spotted in the old, decrepit entertainment district. Primula glanced again at her weapon of choice. A violin. That’s where the information diverged. Kryzalid was allegedly killed after she gunned down thirty-seven civilians and four Peacekeepers in a shopping mall despite being blind, though her corpse was never recovered. There were no mentions of that violin anywhere in her file. Yet, the woman standing in her path was unquestionably her target. The blindfold. The braids. The general body shape, voice, even her grin. All checked out, except for her weapon of choice… and that excuse of a hooded outfit that barely covered her legs, if at all.

Primula raised her blade. The dead had already vanished from her thoughts. There would have been time later to mourn her team, provided there was anything to mourn at all. Her lymph boiled, her muscles trembled, her legs bent to get the maximum impulse. An impulse she unleashed in one go, ramming at Kryzalid full speed ahead. A wide machete swipe, at the height of her target’s head. Kryzalid jumped back right on time, the blade grazing her robe, cutting through the dark blue fabric, leaving an ample gash right under her collar bones. A follow-up vertical slash, right in the middle of Kryzalid’s eyes. Her bow intercepted the attack, clashed with it. Metal on metal, black and gold versus silver and blue. Kryzalid recoiled due to the strength of Primula’s blow, lost ground in her dance of death. Then, she jumped up, two, three meters above, landing on a rusted crane, outside of Primula’s range. She took down her hood without ever stop grinning, her red mane bathed in the moonlight. And held her violin against her cheek, once again.

Primula didn’t wait. She pushed a button on her machete’s handle. The blade burned bright, engulfed by a blue halo, as fuel poured into it. A contained plasma field, the ultimate cutting weapon. Primula roared, swiped the machete in a wide horizontal arc.

Cutting the pillars of the crane in one go.

Burned rust, molten metal, sparks flying. The structure fell down into pieces, collapsed into a shower of rubble. Kryzalid, though, was in the air again, gliding as if nothing happened, her violin and bow kept in an elegant pose. A somewhat rough landing on the warehouse roof, still without losing her cool. And the usual grin, adorning her face in a bout of mockery.

“Here comes the reprise, just for my favorite audience!”

Music. Again. A restless stream of dissonant notes. In the blink of an eye, the headless body of Group A’s leader inflated like a balloon, exploded in a rain of blood and entrails. Then a second body. Then another, then one more. Primula tapped her roots, let them wrap around her head as a preventive defense, let her body structure oscillate to counteract the pressure waves. A different resonance, this time, a different frequency, targeting another material or organ. Stomach. It had to be the stomach. Kryzalid’s violin was making them burst inside the freshly dead bodies, like gas bombs, triggering those explosions that littered the space around them in red. At the beginning, her target had to be the gray matter that made brains. Primula had felt it, shifted her structure around just in time to defend against that sonic assault. When the new attack came, she was ready. Every inch of her body traversed by sound waves, every decibel counteracted before it could become deadly, protecting her from obliteration. She revved up her blade, as the tendrils moving under her skin kept her body from being overwhelmed by the solo. Kryzalid performed a curtsy, her grin even wider.

“You resisted that too! Congratulations!”

The answer was a slash of the plasma blade, melting concrete like butter, mere centimeters away from its target. Kryzalid leapt on a nearby crane at the last second, rising up and up on the rusted structure, step after step, without stopping laughing even for one second.

“You’re such a beautiful specimen, so… you know what? Change of plans! I wanna get a taste of your lymph! But, like, all that packaging is annoying, yes?“

Her bow picked the strings one more time, as Kryzalid’s tongue licked her lips and teeth in one continuous movement.

“Time to open my lunchbox.”

Primula shifted her structure one more time, trying to guess which part of her body was going to be the target this time. Bones, maybe? That would have been a safe bet. So, she rearranged the structure of her skeleton, put it slightly out of the usual tune. As the notes hit her, as the music kept playing in an even more dissonant crescendo, though, something felt amiss. She didn’t experience the same churning sensation, the same vomit-inducing twist as before. It was almost as if her tissues weren’t the target of that song of death, a song that abruptly changed rhythm. Though she felt something else. Abrupt noises. Coming from everywhere around her. From her right hand too. From the machete. And that’s when she saw them. The cracks. The cracks on her blade. On the handle. Spreading. Multiplying.

Till her weapon was no more.

Broken down to shards no bigger than a coin.

“What the fu…”

She stood still, barely realizing what had just happened. Only for her armor to crack too. Her gloves. Her shoulder pads. Her breastplate. Her reinforced boots. Her knee and elbow pads. Cracking. Breaking down every second more, losing pieces, fragmenting, shattering. The right shoulder pad was the first to explode. Then the right glove. The left knee pad. Her breastplate. Her belt. Then everything else, in a concerto of broken metal, of falling splinters. Then, it came the ripping sound. Fabric torn, in a shapeless cacophony of screams, as what was left of her suit got shredded to bits, over and over, faster and faster, till the last thread gave up and all that was left was her bare skin, nothing else.

The music stopped. The bow left the violin. The deed was done. Nothing protected Primula’s body from the blind gaze of Kryzalid, from her wild smile going from ear to ear. Drool flowed down the violinist’s lower lip, as her mind went wild imagining what her eyes could not see anymore.

“See, I love unpacked food, Prim! I wish I could see your curves now, you must be all grown up. But later! Later! Now, it’s time to grab a bite!”

The roots around Primula’s neck showed their true nature, appendices of a longer organic structure, starting from her back and replacing her spine completely, branching out, growing around her body. The left side of her ribcage, under her left breast, was embraced by dry, wooden fingers, as well as her right shoulder, her right thigh, her left calf. Live vessels, pulsating, delving in, bursting out of her deathly pale skin, in a maze of subtle veins. In her gaze stood a mix of annoyance and discomfort, as her hands moved almost automatically to cover her sensitive bits. Only for an instant, though, the instant required to realize that her opponent was blind. In less than a second, her right hand reached for her neck, tapped the roots again. The wooden tendrils reacted to her touch, causing more of them to emerge from her vertebrae, rise behind her nape, forming a growth that could have been mistaken for a handle. Then, her fingers closed around it. And started pulling.

A primal yell escaped her lips, her eyes closed, her teeth gritted, as the vines slowly split from their base, while she unsheathed a white, bone-like needle from her spine, centimeter after centimeter. One last groan, a sound of snapped bark. And, finally, it was all out. A shining, meter-long spike that once was part of her body. Pearl reflexes drenched in green slime, ripped branches hanging all round it. Primula elegantly brandished the newborn weapon, while her lymph vessels pumped, the hole in her spinal conduit closed, regenerating the gap little by little. Then, she arced her back, bent her right arm.

And threw the spine like a spear.

Kryzalid couldn’t hear it coming. A precise strike, a bolt from the blue. In a trail that left only vacuum in its wake, the spike flew at supersonic speed, piercing her right shoulder, throwing her off balance. She lost the grip on her bow, her body spun around carried by the momentum of the projectile. Her head crashed on the concrete, her violin fell close to her. When she finally realized what hit her and how, she felt an unnatural pressure over her. The air itself was bending, twitching in ways she could feel. Her arm was pulsating, her fingers barely responding to her commands. She gritted her teeth, understood what it meant. Primula, the rhizome she was taunting seconds before, had to be there, towering over her body with those cold eyes of hers. That once innocent, shy girl, Prim, was now standing atop her slumped, motionless body. Then, Kryzalid felt something else. A violent pull, the spear removed from her shoulder with one continuous, sudden gesture, causing her pain to flare up even more, her blood to flow in the emptiness left by the makeshift spike. Till the voice came. The cold voice of a creature that was only apparently human. A monster ready to carry out her judgment.

“Mimi LeFou. For the crime of killing thirty-seven unarmed civilians and twenty-four Peacekeeping Officers, you are sentenced to…”

A muted bang cut her words short, caused her to recoil. Smoke. A cloud of smoke enveloped her, enveloped them. A fit of cough. Primula kneeled, coughed again. That acrid smell. Burned bark. Burned remains of plants or maybe even of…

She roared, tried to adjust her vision, to locate her target. Yet, nothing was left. Only a puddle of blood, where once Kryzalid wounded shoulder lay.

So that bastard was.

Gone.

Her prey was gone.

And she was powerless to stop her.

Primula lowered her spear, closed her eyes, drew a long breath, sighed, shook her head. Frustrated words escaped her lips, mixed with chewed insults. She stared at the scythe of moon in complete silence, then down, to the macabre stew of human remains. She curled forward, let her spine tendrils take over, elongate, delve into the broken flesh, into the scattered entrails. The roots swelled, as they started drawing in the remaining fluids and minerals from the poor remains of her team, driving them to her vessels.

After all, wasting all that precious water would have been a cardinal sin.