Voracity
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3.9 For Yuri, I Go Clubbing in Another Dimension
🕑 Added 2025-07-21 09:01:47 +0000 UTC“Agatha!?” I reach out for her but hesitate, unsure of what she’s going through or how I can help. I keep the deimovore’s “corpse” in my peripheral vision, wary of it using this opportunity to attack or escape.
The Visage heroine spews her guts out all over the forest floor. She clutches at her stomach and gurgles, eyes wide and shining, until the last of the sick dribbles out of her mouth and words start to pour instead:
“The colors—they’re all wrong, they’re not—too many, too many, too many! I don’t understand—I can’t—it won’t stop, make it stop, make it stop!” Agatha wails, her cries turning incoherent, and then she shuts her eyes tight and covers her face with her hands, babbling to herself in hushed whispers.
She dropped her glasses when whatever this is started—thankfully not in the same place as she vomited—so I delicately pick them up and offer them back to her, gently poking one of her hands to get her attention. “You dropped your glasses. They might help?”
Agatha scrabbles for her glasses and slides them back on. Her speech quiets, she takes a few deep breaths, and she opens her eyes again, nervous and hesitant. “Th-thank you,” she says. “Sorry, that was—it was intense. I’ve never had that happen before.”
“What did happen?” I ask.
My imps explode.
Instantly my gun is trained on the deimovore cadaver, but when the fireball clears it’s already gone. There’s another hole in the ground. The bastard thing escaped, and now it could be anywhere.
“Fuck!” I swear. “Shit on a whore! Ass! Piss! Goddamn it. I hate this place.”
Agatha takes in the sight of the tunnel and quickly unlatches her grimoire again, flipping through it with grim determination. “We should try to meet up with the others,” she advises, “since our combined firepower wasn’t enough to make it stay down.”
I keep my eyes peeled for any sign of the monster and float further off the ground so I’ll have more time to react if it tries another ambush from below. “Howl says the fuckers never stay dead. I tried to imprison it in hardening foam and it just dissolved the stuff, think your ice will do any better?”
“I’m not confident,” she admits. “Maybe we should run?”
“Running’s a good idea,” Ferromancer crackles through both our earpieces. “Howl is west of you, near the city limits. I’ll link you.”
“How am I supposed to figure out what direction is west?” I complain. “It’s not like I brought a compass with me—wait, does this world even have magnetic poles?”
“I’ve got it,” Agatha volunteers happily. “I saw Polaris on the way here.”
We fly away from the site of the deimovore attack with Agatha leading the way. I’m on watch the whole time, paranoid that at any moment the monster could return.
“So, the way my power works,” Agatha explains as we move, “is that I see ‘connections’ as lines of colored string. It’s… not a precise system, per se. Colors can have multiple meanings depending on context, and I’ve had to puzzle those meanings out through more conventional investigation; I only get the very vaguest sense of what a line could mean from my power itself.”
“That’s not as strong as I thought it would be,” I admit. “You always made it seem like—”
I cut myself off, suddenly aware I’ve said too much, but it’s too late; Agatha notices my slip and brightens like a lightbulb. “So you have watched my stream! What did you think?”
Internally, I scream. Externally, I laugh and scratch my head sheepishly. “Yeah, a few times. It felt awkward to mention. I like them! You’ve got a cute persona and come across as really personable. I loved your playthrough of Oxenfree.”
Agatha beams and blushes. “Oh, wow, thank you so much! That’s really nice to hear. Sorry, I know that’s totally not relevant here, I just—sorry, thank you.”
Aw, she’s insecure. Agatha’s still one of the less popular Visage icons—for reasons I can’t fathom—so she must be having a hard time comparing herself to the big names like Memento and Pearl Princess. It’s going to be so easy to make this girl like me.
“Um, so! When I tried to use my power on the deimovore, what happened is that I saw… wrong colors.” Agatha shivers. “It had strings connecting it to things I couldn’t see, and none of the colors of those lines were real. I can’t explain them, I can’t describe them, they were just—unnatural. They hurt to look at. It was like—like my brain was trying to absorb something too alien to comprehend. Too dense, maybe?”
I take another sweep of the area, watching for any movement between the trees or strange burrows in the dirt. “That sounds like a nightmare,” I sympathize. “Do you think it’ll be like that everywhere?”
“I’m afraid to check,” Agatha admits, “but I’ll have to sooner or later. Ugh, I really hope I don’t have to start over from zero. It took ages to learn what all the colors meant!”
“Hey, kiddos, still alive?” crackles Howl from both our earpieces.
I roll my eyes at Agatha, who quietly giggles to herself. “Yeah, yeah,” I say to Howl. “What do you want, old hag?”
“You’ll see me as soon as you break the treeline.” Ahead, the trees are starting to thin. I can almost make out the city beyond, though there’s a gray haze clouding the distance. “Now, tell me everything that happened with the beastie.”
So I do. By the time I’m done, we’re at the forest’s edge. Forks-in-Glass shines below a night sky clearer and more colorful than what light pollution would ever allow, an eerie mirror of the real city; polished and pristine, bedecked in billboards and banners. The names and likenesses of magical girls—and a few witches—are displayed with even greater abundance than in real Forks, the shadow of their glory cast across the whole skyline.
The Visage Spire—the twining towers in the heart of the entertainment district—looks taller here than it does in the real world. It looms over the city, glowing gently. The golden orb floating above is the most changed, with a strange texture I can’t make out at this distance and a horizontal seam running along the middle.
Howl is sitting on the roof of a house on the outskirts, her wolf beside her, a raven perched on her shoulder, and an unstrung bow—plain, wooden, and tall, nothing like the mechanical compound bow I’ve seen pictures of her using—in her lap. She hops off the roof as we approach, her animal companions following her.
“The deimovore is a problem,” she says instead of greeting us. “It’s a fear-eater, and now that it’s taken a bite of you it knows exactly what makes you afraid. Before it was guessing, which is why it switched to spiders when the bear in the woods didn’t get a natural reaction.”
“Arachnophobia is one of the most common fear disorders,” Agatha chimes in, happy to have something to contribute.
I glance around the area, wary of the deimovore sneaking up on us while we’re talking. The city is bright but empty, and it makes me think of walking past the mall at night when no one’s around. Liminal spaces, I think they call it. There aren’t even any cars tucked away in parking spots. An abandoned metropolis that’s still getting fresh electricity, distant turn signals still blinking between colors.
“It’ll be hunting you,” Howl interrupts my thoughts, “and waiting for a chance to get you alone. Forget the crude shapeshifting you saw before, next time it’ll have perfect mimicry of voices you’ve heard and faces you’ve seen.”
I grimace. “Great. Something to look forward to.”
Agatha adjusts her glasses, looking around even more nervously than I was. “Lots of places for it to hide.”
Howl whistles and her raven takes flight, skimming low to avoid the invisible ceiling as it moves into the city proper. “Huginn will give us an extra pair of eyes, but the deimovore isn’t the worst of it; those things are ambush predators, normally, hunting whatever mortals they can lure into their web.”
Harlequin was hunting monsters that had escaped to our world. It sounds like whatever passages are being made, they go both ways. Are they full portals like the one we entered through, or something stranger? Has there been an uptick in missing persons cases, or do they have an even stronger version of the veil than we do?
“If they see a mage, they stalk it to check if it’s panicking or calm. Deimovores never pick fights unless they can go straight for the bite, and they usually cut and run after a couple of misses. Whoever fucked our portal entry sent the monster to greet you, and I’d bet the same is true of the painflayers that went after Delilah and Harlequin.”
“Sorry, the what?” Agatha asks with alarm.
Howl chuckles. “I’ll explain on the way, let’s get moving. We’re headed downtown.” She sets off at a steady pace deeper into the city, Agatha and I following behind with a shared look of concern.
It’s actually Ferromancer who answers first, having been listening to our conversation—she must be listening to everyone, though I have no idea how she’s keeping track of it all. “Those two were dropped close by and found each other quick, though they weren’t happy about it. The knives were already out when a pack of skinless freaks with spiked chains and barbed hooks swarmed their location.”
“Painflayers!” Howl repeats with more cheer than normal. “Love those psychos. They come in numbers and they never retreat. They feed on pain like deimovores feed on fear. Their method is to paralyze their prey—chop the fingers and burn the stump, chain the ankles and break the knees—and start ripping in. They make a game of seeing how many wounds they can inflict before the victim bleeds out.”
Agatha goes pale and swallows. “Oh. I see.”
“Get used to it,” Howl says scathingly. “These aren’t play fights; no script, no cameras, just blood and violence. Weakness gets culled out here.”
“You’re such an edgelord, god. ‘Weakness gets culled,’ give me a break. Talk like a person,” I mock, leaping to Agatha’s defense as I float past another vacant, well-lit home.
Howl stops. For a moment I see deep irritation cross her face, but then she sighs, runs her fingers through her hair, and says, “Right. I am telling you these things because if you do not adapt quickly then you will get eaten. There are things in this world that can hurt you in ways no healing will ever fix—monsters that don’t care about the rule of three, or that don’t need to kill you to ruin your life. I’ve seen it. I’ve lost friends to it. Is that what you needed to hear?”
My sense of unease ratchets up a new notch. There are things in this world that can take me away from Sophia. I think about apologizing for Howl’s loss, but she can probably tell it doesn’t mean anything to me. “That… definitely changes how I interpret what you said. Still rude, but, yeah. Fair.” I hesitate. “I’m—”
Howl raises a hand to interrupt me. “Eyes up and weapons ready, we’ve got jitterhounds incoming. Short-range teleporters. Watch for smoke. Fenris, meet up with Muninn.”
Agatha frowns, but doesn’t say anything as she readies her grimoire. Howl strings her bow and pulls an arrow from a quiver that wasn’t there before. Fenris gives its master a nuzzle and then races off toward the city center. I refresh my gun. Teleporters, so I should be careful not to fire when my target is between me and an ally.
The gray haze is thickening into fog, obscuring distant objects and putting a chill in the air that I don’t feel. My breath mists. We’ve stopped in one of the more commercial areas within the suburb cluster around the University of Forks. There’s a strip mall to our left and a park to our right, and the road we’re traveling down leads past the campus toward the heart of the city.
Smoke billows out of the park, scentless and thick. It mixes with the fog, shrouding the whole world from view. Then the jitterhounds attack.
They look more like sculptures of dogs than real canines; their bodies are too sharp, like they’ve been carved into shape and left unpolished, then painted over to mimic flesh. Their legs are thin and lean and there are far too many of them—six, eight, ten, the number seems to change as they run. Their faces are eyeless and earless, but they have plenty of teeth.
They spring from smoke and rush us. I was expecting them to teleport in leaps and bounds, but instead it’s like they’re constantly flickering in and out of existence, or like someone sped up movie footage and cut out half the frames.
Howl still takes out three of them in as many seconds. Each arrow she looses finds the head of a hound with terrifying precision, one striking her target the instant it emerges from another short-range teleport. Agatha’s approach is to bombard the whole area with fire and ice, blasting indiscriminately. I plink away with my pea shooter.
More come, and the fog thickens. Agatha’s spells do nothing to part the shroud, leaving less and less of a window to shoot the jitterhounds before they’re on us.
“This isn’t normal!” Howl shouts. “Something—”
And then Howl is gone, and Agatha, and I’m surrounded by gray. No hounds come out of the fog. I take a step back, then another, gun held at the ready.
“Howl? Agatha?” No response. “Ferromancer?”
My earpiece whines, high-pitched and shrill, and heavy static blasts my ear. Then it stops, and I can make out the voice of my teacher. “Archon? Can you hear me?”
I let out a relieved breath. “Yeah, I hear you. Ferro, I’ve lost visual on the others, there’s this weird fog—”
“It’s not just you,” she interrupts. “I’m getting massive amounts of interference on everyone. I can’t connect any of you to each other on comms, and location data says you’ve all shuffled again. I think this is the work of our mystery foe. I can see the fog through the nearest window, but it doesn’t reach this high. I’m going to try and direct everyone to my location. Start moving and I’ll guide you.”
“Got it.”
I follow Ferromancer’s instructions, flying through the endless fog and turning left or right as directed. Every so often I fly just close enough to a street sign or a storefront that I can make it out, which only adds to the creepiness of my journey—each approaching shape gets my gun trained on it before it resolves into something familiar. I’ve never been this unsettled by fog, and I think I’m going to cut back on early morning walks.
A few minutes into my journey—no sign of the jitterhounds or anything else—my earpiece crackles again and Ferromancer asks me, “Do you have a weapon summoned?”
“The gun I pilfered from the heist,” I confirm. “Not sure how much good it’ll do.”
“Okay. You’re almost to the office, so here’s what I want you to do: I want you to put that gun in your mouth and pull the trigger until the magazine clicks empty or your healing factor turns off and you bleed out on the street, your brains splattered all over the asphalt. Can you do that for me, doll?”
I freeze in terror. That voice, so casual and self-assured, is perfectly Ferromancer. But those words can’t possibly be hers. “You’re not Ferromancer,” I whisper.
She laughs. She laughs and laughs and laughs, and as she does her voice warps and distorts, and then it settles into another voice. Another laugh. A voice I’ve heard so many times before. A laugh that I give all of myself, every day, to try and hear again.
“Oh, Rachel,” Sophia sighs, warm and soft and lovely and not my Sophia. “Always just a little too slow.”
I’m alone in the fog with the deimovore.
Comments
Lako
Thanks for the chapter! Holy shit!
Clara
She's gonna come out of this really unhinged huh
Leviathon251
The cliff TwT
Clara
Considering the wrong colours thing, it might interact very poorly
FuriousDee
I suspect using Sophie might make her more mad (either meaning) than scared. Also I wonder what would happen if she just feeds the whole thing into Prometheus’s fire
Neropol
Now that's a cliffhanger.
Sinantrarion
Oh hey. That's terrifying. Thanks for the chapter.
