Assassin from Abyss

Chapter 2: Rude Awakening

Pain.

Excruciating pain, surging through Kei’s bones and his blood, tearing and gnawing at the whole of him.

He lay in a puddle of his own blood, its warmth arguing with the cold of the floor beneath him. He tried to rise. The pain came up so hard it felt like a hand pressing him flat, holding him down against the stone.

It moved through him as it pleased, and then it found his head. His skull. It felt as though the muscle inside his brain were being run through with current. Blood ran from his eyes and from his nose, and Kei passed out, unable to hold against it any longer.

An hour, perhaps two, and he came back.

The raw stench of blood, laced through with something foul and musty, filled his nose and dragged his senses up after it, and his eyes came open.

The room was pitch dark. And yet he saw it clearly — every part of it, as though the dark were no obstacle at all.

A medium room, stone-walled, moss grown thick in the corners so that the air of it sat damp and close. In front of him lay chains. Metal, heavy, thick — and torn to pieces, ripped apart the way a wild thing rips at what binds it until the binding gives.

In one corner stood a jade flagon, near five feet tall, cracked all across its outer surface as though it had been struck again and again with something hard. It had not broken. The jade was too fine for that. A metal door closed off one end of the room. The rest of it was empty.

Kei’s muscles were spent, the fatigue in them so deep that he twisted and turned on the floor before his own strength came back to him and let him stand.

" Where am I? " His voice came rough. " Am I a prisoner? Did I pass out? "

The questions turned in him and found no answers. His eyes went to the blood on the floor, the smell of it pulling at him, and the darker thoughts arrived on their own.

" Was I taken? Another syndicate. " He looked at the mossed stone, the torn chains, the cracked jade. " This is an old torture room. Bastards. I need to get out. I need to find — Miriam. "

The name struck a spark somewhere behind his eyes.

It caught, and it grew, and it hit his mind with the whole of its force, and the memories came flooding in — water out of a spillway when the dam gate lifts.

" Ahh — "

He held his throbbing head as his past came back in frames of hard bright image. The orphanage. Beating Ganzuo bloody. The Yakuza. The turning-away from the blood, the ranch in Texas, the long solitude. Meeting Miriam. Falling. The wedding.

Sakura, wearing Miriam’s face.

The poison in her lipstick. The shock of it. The betrayal. The rage. The dying.

" That abazure — " The word tore out of him in his mother tongue. " That conniving yariman. I will kill her. I will kill her — "

The memories stopped pouring at last, and there was nothing left to do with what they had left behind. Unable to hold the rage in, Kei drove his fists into the jade flagon, Miriam’s face floating in front of him, her last words still ringing in his ears.

Craaack. Craaack.

The cracks spread wider under the blows. He felt nothing in his hands, no pain, and he did not stop.

" I will kill you, Miriam. " Each word a punch. " Don’t you dare die first. I will kill you with my own hands. I will avenge my own death — I swear it. "

Boom.

The flagon burst apart under a last heavy blow, jade scattering across the floor. It had been empty; nothing spilled from it. Kei stood over the pieces, breathing hard, and looked around the room — and then it struck him like a thing out of a clear sky, and he said it aloud. freewёbn૦νeɭ.com

" Damn the gods. How am I alive? "

The question would not let him go. He had been poisoned to death. He had felt himself die.

" I did not die? That is not possible. She used something strong — the burning in my chest, that was the Beijing cocktail, it had to be. There is no antidote to it. So how am I breathing? " He stopped. " Or is this hell ?"

Hell.

The word lit another spark, and the spark began a chain — spark after spark, of every size, blooming through his neurons and striking his mind one after another, and with each strike something poured into him. Information. A whole compendium of forbidden knowledge. Strings of memory that were not his, downloading into his brain in array after array.

Kei had transmigrated into the body of another being.

Everything that being had known, everything it had been, was his now — inherited, whole. And as his mind worked through it and understood what it was holding, his senses went numb, and his grasp on the world took a blow at its very center.

" Shit , " Kei said. " Hell would have been better than this. "

He had crossed into an outer plane. A plane the Gods had turned their backs on and left to itself.

The Abyss.