4. “ARGENT”
A frantic battle, in which steel meets steel, and ferocity meets tenacity.
銀色
As Mina fell, time and reality itself seemed to tear itself apart. The slipstream tossed her about like a ragdoll in every fathomable direction. Left, right, up, down, up again.
It was a cosmic washing machine, and Mina was the bic lighter along for the ride.
After an indiscernible amount of time (was it five minutes or five lifetimes?), her descent began to slow, and she was floating. In a drunken confused-shock cocktail of a stupor, Mina threw up, and watched blearily as the technicolor discharge floated up, away, and then seemed to disintegrate above her.
After a two second respite, which was certainly not enough time for our protagonist to process what was happening, the humming began, again.
As the pitch of it continued to rise, Mina began to panic, looking about desperately for a way out. No matter how much she spasmed or contorted herself, she wasn’t moving anywhere.
There was nothing for her to grab onto. Just tiny, weightless, spinning particles of blue and purple light that floated about in dandelion fashion.
As the blue light continued to swirl lazily all about her, the humming began to rise in pitch once more. Mina took a half of a breath before it all erupted again, catapulting her downward into what she anticipated was her impending oblivion.
Unbeknownst to Mina, what awaited her was far more sinister.
With a boom, the quivering blue light gave.
Mina spun, tumbling head over heels, freefalling inside of a streak of white light through the neon-lit night sky.
Grey, oblong buildings came into view as Mina’s fall slowed with another loud, resounding boom.
Mina was floating again, white prisms of light spiraling and humming about around her body. The resonant humming began to fade away, lower in pitch and volume.
The prisms splintered off into nothing, the humming stopped, and Mina flopped onto a rooftop unceremoniously.
Coughing and groaning, Mina picked herself up.
Astonishingly enough, she was completely intact. Instead, her wounds had disappeared, and her clothes were spotless, seemingly absolved of any previous wear and tear.
Looking around her, Mina tried to discern her whereabouts, trying to unpack what could have possibly just happened.
Where was she?
What was this strange place?
As she took in her surroundings, desperately searching for some sort of landmark, a masked apparition of a man clad in a hazmat suit appeared in a plume of black smoke.
Her instincts kicked into high gear. With a loud clang, Mina drew her katana from her back, swiftly batted her assailant’s weapon to the side, and leapt backwards.
Her eyes narrowed, and Mina gripped her sword tightly before posing her question.
”Who are you, and what do you want?”
The man smiled underneath his mask.
”I’m going to save the world.”