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Chapter 37: World's End
Last Updated:
2023-11-10 10:17:22
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The Reaper's Pet Chapter 38: The Massacre
The projected Transmigration Bureau agents charge and scatter the Ravens attacking close to the ground. Kera either slashes them apart with her overgrown talons or bites them in half with her fangs. Ankou throws a barrage of acidic blood-balls just like a rapid pitching machine. And Yama Ranger, on his creepy steed Nightmare, blasts away with his two six-shooters, a lever-action carbine in his third hand and his portal-opening lasso in his fourth. A second group of rescuers arrives at the scene. A few residents from the tenements round the corner and approach with caution not because of the invisible battle taking place right on top of them but at the sight of both Chester and Rina lying on the ground, the first bathed in his own blood and the second having fainted in terror. The gang leader responsible for everything stands transfixed above the bodies. The act of killing a man with his bare hands has finally registered with him and he flounders like a stage volunteer cut off from a h
Last Updated : 2023-11-11The Reaper's Pet Chapter 39: Unholy Alliance
{Special delivery, boss,} Ankou announces in his doll-like voice which always sounds like it’s coming from a phonograph record embedded in him. The only difference this time is his head with the Cheshire-cat grin has been torn off and is tucked under his arm. {Spank these foul creatures back to our hole sweet hell.} Without warning, Ankou’s voice is reduced to gurgling, as though the doll had suddenly been thrown into a fire. At Hell’s Helm, Spinstra has just sliced his throat. Ankou’s death-wagon springs out Septimus’s guitar case and the head reaper catches it in mid-air. Ankou then stomps on the accelerator to ram the Ravens’ front lines, disappearing into an uncertain fate but buying Septimus a little more time. Septimus lays the guitar case on the asphalt and opens it, revealing an orange Gretsch Chet Atkins whose front pickup has been replaced with a black Gibson P-90. He picks up the instrument and slings its strap over his shoulder, looking every bit the goth rock star m
Last Updated : 2023-11-12The Reaper's Pet Epilogue: The Bureau of Transmigration
Everything fades into regular, high-pitched beeping. I open my eyes to the disorienting sight of tubes snaking from my body. {Where in God’s name am I?} I sit bolt upright and tear some of the tubes off my chest. This starts a rapid alarm from the machinery next to the bed I’m lying on. {Sol’s at the park,} I remember vaguely. {No, that can’t be right. Sol’s visiting me…} {…at the beach house…} All the memories of the past week come flooding back; a literal information overload. The surrealism of my experiences strains my grip on reality and triggers an alarm on the EKG monitor. But thankfully, incredibly, my brain succeeds in reducing everything to a manageable size. Nurses rush into the room with their mouths hanging open. “I know everything,” I whisper to myself. “I know who I am now.” **** The rebellion that spilled over to the surface world shall be known forevermore as the Battle of the Bolgias. A great number of Death’s loyal guards, the Helter-Skeltals, have shed ma
Last Updated : 2023-11-13The Reaper's Pet Chapter 1: This Damned Timer in my Brain
They exist among us in secret. Their ancient war has spilled across the borders into our world, and what passed for blood from their undying energies inked the provisions for a halfhearted truce. They are the two great primal forces; the superpowers of the afterlife. One spawned by light, the other by darkness. One tasked with repurposing everlasting souls into mortal shells, the other with banishing them into a perfect, lightless prison. They come in many forms but all of them discreet, misleading. Some mortals regard them as angels. Others worship them as gods of destiny. All reduce them into familiar myth and superstition to dull the world-shattering implications of their existence. Ultimately, the two warring camps take their most consistent and harmless forms: stalwart storks and ravenous ravens. Any human word or symbol would be a cliché because they’re as familiar as the laws of physics or the number of fingers on one’s hand. The true mistake is man’s habit to value one to the
Last Updated : 2023-10-17The Reaper's Pet Chapter 2: Raptures of the Deep
All at once I’m in the kitchen getting ready for a dive. It’s like this when the infernal timer is abuzz in my brain; I move around in a fog. I decide to leave a note for Sol because she might arrive this morning as per the old schedule. {How can we be soulmates}, I write, {if I don't have a soul of my own?} I pin the note under a fridge magnet before I can chicken out. Our slow falling-out is hurting both of us. The timer inside my head and my oneiric visions have given birth to a secret third presence. Like a fat black Buddha sitting cross-legged between Sol and I, it keeps growing and pushing us apart. But maybe that’s for the best. Sol awakens in people a thirst for life they never knew they had. Sol; her skin baked to a golden-brown heaven so every time she smiles there’s the jarring contrast of pearly teeth. I can never resist freediving for those underwater gems that beckon for three-minute breath holds. A part-time influencer and full-time vet in an animal shelter, Sol’s Fili
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With a jolt that’s more mental than physical, I slip through the solid bottom of the boat and back into the water. I sink like a statue flanked by the erratic blackbirds. The medium’s completely wrong but I’m falling backwards at a skydiver’s terminal velocity: sixty meters per second. I can tell because I used to be into motorcycles. But riding is nothing compared to this. Nothing can ever compare to this. I’m being sucked down a maelstrom of hissing, exploding water; a human bowling ball down a slide that stretches all the way to the bottom of the sea. I feel an intolerable amount of pressure and pain building against the tissues of my middle ear. Then I hear a light pop – hard to tell if real or imagined – followed by a gushing feeling of relief as cool water flows past the bleeding eardrum on either side of my skull. I slide out of the sunlight into the twilight zone, two hundred meters below surface, and on till I finally pass the bluest zone of the sea that divers only dream of
Last Updated : 2023-10-17The Reaper's Pet Chapter 4: The Terminal of the Dead
Wet and warm sensations all over my face, in a slobbery, affectionate way that for a moment I think I’m back at Nuestra Señora de la Buen Viaje and being woken up by Gamby. Then I remember the stray puppy has been dead over a decade ago and my eyes snap open. A bear of a dog is licking my face – or rather, the blood dripping out of the open wounds in my face – while something close is making a hissing sound like a pit of snakes. I drag my ass through the muddy bank and scream. Another dog turns to snarl at me and then a third, till my brain registers that all three heads are attached to the same giant, thickly-muscled neck. {Kerberos}. Greek mythology from high school floods over me and I whimper. {The Hellhound. Sibling to the monsters Chimaera and Hydra}. All three heads are barking a volley of thunder so I press my hands over my ears to protect them from further damage, but then my eyes fall on the curious mane down the dog’s broad back. I note how the hair is sort of glistening,
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No two objects of mass can occupy the same space at the same time, and yet, just as it was at my sentencing, I become partly conscious of other people undergoing the torture along with me. Apart from my own, I can hear wails screeching into mad laughter as we’re all, slowly but confidently, dragged towards our darkest nightmare. Our backs slam against the back wall of the elevator and stay there as though we were in the rotor ride of an amusement park. As much as I want to glimpse my fellow victims, I can’t even turn my head as I hang restrained by all the weird g-forces and the superfluous chains that smell of either rust or dried blood. There’s an elevator operator who calls out each floor, all of them going downwards and deeper to the true essence of terror. Only it doesn’t look like there are buttons to control the box; instead, the operator manipulates ropes that disappear into a hole in the ceiling. Eventually, no matter how hard my sanity refuses to accept it, the thing that’s
Last Updated : 2023-10-17
Latest chapter
The Reaper's Pet Epilogue: The Bureau of Transmigration
Everything fades into regular, high-pitched beeping. I open my eyes to the disorienting sight of tubes snaking from my body. {Where in God’s name am I?} I sit bolt upright and tear some of the tubes off my chest. This starts a rapid alarm from the machinery next to the bed I’m lying on. {Sol’s at the park,} I remember vaguely. {No, that can’t be right. Sol’s visiting me…} {…at the beach house…} All the memories of the past week come flooding back; a literal information overload. The surrealism of my experiences strains my grip on reality and triggers an alarm on the EKG monitor. But thankfully, incredibly, my brain succeeds in reducing everything to a manageable size. Nurses rush into the room with their mouths hanging open. “I know everything,” I whisper to myself. “I know who I am now.” **** The rebellion that spilled over to the surface world shall be known forevermore as the Battle of the Bolgias. A great number of Death’s loyal guards, the Helter-Skeltals, have shed ma
The Reaper's Pet Chapter 39: Unholy Alliance
{Special delivery, boss,} Ankou announces in his doll-like voice which always sounds like it’s coming from a phonograph record embedded in him. The only difference this time is his head with the Cheshire-cat grin has been torn off and is tucked under his arm. {Spank these foul creatures back to our hole sweet hell.} Without warning, Ankou’s voice is reduced to gurgling, as though the doll had suddenly been thrown into a fire. At Hell’s Helm, Spinstra has just sliced his throat. Ankou’s death-wagon springs out Septimus’s guitar case and the head reaper catches it in mid-air. Ankou then stomps on the accelerator to ram the Ravens’ front lines, disappearing into an uncertain fate but buying Septimus a little more time. Septimus lays the guitar case on the asphalt and opens it, revealing an orange Gretsch Chet Atkins whose front pickup has been replaced with a black Gibson P-90. He picks up the instrument and slings its strap over his shoulder, looking every bit the goth rock star m
The Reaper's Pet Chapter 38: The Massacre
The projected Transmigration Bureau agents charge and scatter the Ravens attacking close to the ground. Kera either slashes them apart with her overgrown talons or bites them in half with her fangs. Ankou throws a barrage of acidic blood-balls just like a rapid pitching machine. And Yama Ranger, on his creepy steed Nightmare, blasts away with his two six-shooters, a lever-action carbine in his third hand and his portal-opening lasso in his fourth. A second group of rescuers arrives at the scene. A few residents from the tenements round the corner and approach with caution not because of the invisible battle taking place right on top of them but at the sight of both Chester and Rina lying on the ground, the first bathed in his own blood and the second having fainted in terror. The gang leader responsible for everything stands transfixed above the bodies. The act of killing a man with his bare hands has finally registered with him and he flounders like a stage volunteer cut off from a h
The Reaper's Pet Chapter 37: World's End
At this point, I finally get either close enough to the scene or far enough outside Spinstra’s control. I manage to reestablish two-way psychic contact with Septimus. {Fight back,} I tell him. {Use your powers and defend yourself. You’re dying out there!} {Wampus, you came back for me...} Septimus’s voice is filled with genuine relief as though loyalty and friendship are such luxuries to him. And I’m ashamed to think his suspicions haven’t been entirely misplaced. The thought of abandoning him has in fact entered my mind. {There is nothing we can do,} Septimus sends back faintly. {The moment we crossed over to the mortal realm, we passed a point of no return. In the abattoir, everyone is bound to get eaten, even wolves in sheep’s clothing.} {Fight them! You’re the Grim Reaper for Christ’s sake. Show them who you are!} {It is over. I have already lingered too long on this side. Listen, Wampus, there is something I need to tell you before it is too late.} The leader’s on Chester
The Reaper's Pet Chapter 36: The Mutiny of the Ravens
“Come on,” one of the muggers coos in the local language, so close to Rina’s face her senses are invaded by the sight of rotten teeth and the smell of sour milk mixed with cigarette. “Give us what we want, doll, and we’ll be outta your hair.” “Yeah,” whispers another with pupils dilated by lust and methamphetamine. “We’ll be outta here before you know it. You won’t even notice we were here.” “You have my bag, my watch, my phone,” Rina says in English through her tears. She hates herself for being this afraid. She’s just so damn afraid. “Take all of them. Just please let me go.” “You know what else we want,” the nearest one coos again and a third leers. The one who has her, apparently the leader, starts groping her. “No, please don’t…” They’re all perfectly oblivious to the swarm of weird, shape-shifting Ravens overhead, so thick now that they blot out the night sky and the top of the two rundown tenements sandwiching the half-lit and desolate street. The birds of Hell are mak
The Reaper's Pet Chapter 35: Master Hand
{Who are you?} I ask. {Are you certain you do not know the answer to this question?} It’s true. I feel like I’ve known all along; this rumbly yet feminine voice with its many layers overlapping. Its owner is a shadow that has constantly loomed over us, moving the pieces across the board with her three pairs of hands. She was the one responsible from the start, orchestrating all the events with cold calculation. She had created the Lachesis computers in Death’s office and sent the Raven Man, none other than thinly disguised Kharon, to the young me at the children’s home. She convinced Septimus to adopt me as his tutor and gave me my second form as a Wampus Cat. She was there too on the banks of River Akheron the moment I arrived in the underworld. She probably even influenced Sol to be at the park this very night. Spinstra. The Fate Weaver. The last piece of the puzzle, the third of the Wyrd Ones. {… she will understand the implications,} Septimus continues orating on the other en
The Reaper's Pet Chapter 34: The Monster
Everything becomes so mesmerizing it’s hard to tell if they’re actually taking place. Chester rises in a fluid and graceful movement but, in reality, his body’s cutting through time like a hot knife sliding through butter. The whole place, the small universe of the band rehearsal studio – from the twitchy second hand of a wall clock to the dog-ears of facial tissues pressed in a holder as they’re cowed by the ceiling fan – all these freeze in mid-action. Or not so much freeze as slow down into a clotted tempo. Rina’s facing forward on the sofa now, stark naked and sitting primly like a very realistic wax sculpture except for her eyes, which glimmer with awareness and concentration. It’s like an isolated object (Chester) is moving at hyper-speed while leaving the rest of the room behind. Like a character in dreamland doing away with the line between point A and B while the sleeper’s mind fills in the gap. The effect is both spell-binding and dizzying. One moment Rina’s sitting on his
The Reaper's Pet Chapter 33: Hell-breaker
{WHERE ARE YOU, WAMPUS?} There’s this strange feeling welling up inside Septimus’s chest. An ominous rhythm like a hundred war drums beating all together. He wants to thrust his hand inside his chest and pluck the feeling out, to stop the hurt. This pain is very curious. It borders the physical, something he can perhaps knead smaller with his hand. It makes it hard for him to breathe, makes him feel sick. He can’t understand it but he keeps recalling a scene he witnessed once on the Lachesis screens: a man getting drenched in the rain and shouting to the heavens while pounding his fist against his chest. Wampus has explained to him once that love in the human world makes someone a gentler, happier and better human being, but the sudden absence of it makes the same person feel small, turns him into something dark and nasty. Because love’s a drug and sooner or later its effects are going to wear out. Then you’ll be down on the cold, hard asphalt like an angel with sheared wings. You’
The Reaper's Pet Chapter 32: The Jam Session
Although I’m away from the band rehearsal studio, I’m still psychically connected to Septimus. It’s like having a baby monitor in the back of your skull. There’s occasionally some signal interference but you’re lulled into a false sense of comfort. For instance, I’m aware that Septimus is playing the electric guitar and performing in front of the starstruck Rina. {“Holy shit”} is the thought that keeps recurring in her head. Holy shit is right because, even though I myself failed to see it, it’s possible that Septimus is a music prodigy; that or just a hardcore OG metalhead. The promised one song has stretched into an entire repertoire because of Rina’s endless cry of “Encore!” Septimus is going through my Eve Serrated covers setlist, which is the same playlist that served as the acoustic backdrop of our lessons in Soul City, plus a slew of other songs from bands I didn’t think he knew: Scorpions, Dio, Twisted Sister, Motley Crue, Metallica, Slayer… As it is with most cover band m
