Raiden

By George Keyes

1

“There is no time, no day, just the existence of being in this neo-planet which it has become our home, Hitoshi. Ah, can we have the gift to restore ourselves again to the last glory?” He looked at his beloved dog Hitoshi, and remarkable enough, he nodded his head in a way he had understood him. “Well, you are as optimistic as always, my dear friend.”

      Before over deeply flat layer of roads Atsumori and Hitoshi could see the earth sporadically rose upon the continent of new mountainous masses and high plateaus while below there were unceasing motions of frozen water and the air sluice the dry land into the endless world. In these layers, a little below the one they were moving over their sky-boomer platform flyer, the cliffs and the vertical cracks of rocks and the rutting deep canyons with unknown layers of harder streams, which they moved slowly over this planet that was his several years earlier; he knew below those layers and streams and canyons there was another world.

      The horizon seemed naked with own its beauty, which Atsumori and his lovely Hitoshi were able to see beyond ten kilometers in speed of light in which it mastered its energy but unknown. It could not easy to convert from one transaction to another, say day or night. Atsumori learned to convert between the two transactions might be awkward to the end of this brightness, and darkness would rule. Cold, bone-penetrated light transformed roads into ghostly black giants, canyons into enlightened dots so its bright kept on and on.

      On their sky-boomer platform flyer Atsumori and Hitoshi were moving in a speed 500 kilometer/hour and if this speed was maintained, then in a time period of three hours the sky-boomer flyer would reach Cyrix, which he presumed it was beyond the electrical resistance provided by the unknown path of Cyrix itself. Today they were browsing, not missing the Matter’s Hold which it was the critical point to Cyrix.

      “We’re all right on track, Hitoshi,” Atsumori said. “So an hour from now, we can rest and get something to eat, right?”

      Hitoshi sped up a little and held his sky-boomer flyer far away before him. He pressed the message sight and there was his message.

      “Right.”

      “That’s my boy.”

      Kept working on their watch, Atsumori sped up.

      A moment later, they together moved ahead.

      Atsumori’s body was protected with new material; the same skin pigmentation known as clone, a fascinating and beautifully human genome which it self-produced without constant hand-holding that would take only a fraction of second to heal. Hitoshi had one, too, with channel crossings of human, for which for him, he only needed was to speak.

      No, Atsumori or Hitoshi was not robot, but they defined to survive in this potential difference across the element measured in weakness, which their entire organism was adapted.

      Atsumori’s body, arms, and legs however expressed in these basic units were facts the supplemental reading human, so Atsumori as well as Hitoshi learned were not enough to survive in this irrational world, and they could adapt just a matter of time. 

      His face covered with transparent mask, which it isolated the richness of the air from the particles of friendly atoms, which gave him and Hitoshi pure oxygen to their body and kept them alive for months. It implied also, then, the well-balanced of their intellectual functions. It was hard for young people like Atsumori to believe that everything in this world was made of atoms and the unknown possibility of survive was less.

      Yet time had changed.

      The survival tool had become a new weapon to create another thing different from atoms or anything else had become a strange balance of nutrition and this neo-world the one from which Atsumori and Hitoshi had come from and that was 100 million below the real surface, for almost two thousand years, his few people had survived before this dry land. He knew it was not enough, light or radiation of the sun had to be converted into the natural drift through its channel.

      During the twenty-four century moving backward, he and his beloved dog had found yet a soul since their travel from the surface and they began to worry if they had reached the ending structure of thing as Aoi had instructed him to find and fear started to create puzzles in front of him.

      There were some curious discoveries he had noted such as the Invisibility of footsteps above layers of rocks or flat roads, the acceleration of cold wind and at the same time the huge shape, which suggested a pre-moving monster of living electrons with burning red eyes, ahead of them, had expressed concern.

      The faint, far away, images. They could not tell him if they were real or something connected to the earth, because of the possibility of electrical sun-shock wave, as well as the intensity of light, it showed nothing.

      “Hitoshi?”

      He texted his messages.

      “Yes?”

      “Do you think we are on the wrong level?”
      “No, Atsumori. I do believe it’s the real level.”

      “Why are you so sure? I haven’t seen anything yet.”

      “I perceive it.”

      “Yeah, you might be right. I’m a little jumpy.”

      Hitoshi saw Atsumori’s face made an almost fanatical expression in his own comment. He saw now he stared out of the forward spectacular on the flat formation glowing colors and shifting shadows; they were streaking toward the endless horizon. A dense filter protected Atsumori’s and Hitoshi’s eyes and from their own protection desire to the starring brilliance of the dense day. It loomed ever larger by the impulsion as their sky-boomer flyer devoured the miles ahead of them.

        “Hitoshi, let us speed up a little. We need to find a place to rest and to eat. It seems the intensity of the day has become too dense.”

      “Right on, Atsu!”

      So saying that Hitoshi had left a color flash tail come from traces of iron oxide exposed on same lane of the road and it seemed to disappear in front of Atsumori.

      “Ghosh, Hitoshi!” he winced. “Not like that, boy!”

      Atsumori smiled just as his sky-boomer platform flyer reached at a speed never seen before equaled by a sky-boomer flyer. Ahead of him there was Hitoshi, and a moment later, Atsumori was next to him.

      “You were ready for it, uh?”

      “Yeah!”

      “Well, let us rock on it!”

      “You get it, pal!”

      They moved progressively between the layers, below, and above, maneuvering between the streams and landscapes. Atsumori realized he and Hitoshi needed it to forget, making him to understand life after was just fun.

      Atsumori and Hitoshi were not alone. But it came as a surprise as well as confuse when a battalion of long-borned earwigs looked like human cloned beings emerged from the streams. They were wearing away from 1500 kilometers and they motioned to trance the sky-boomer flyers.

      Far beyond the second layers of rocks, Hitoshi looked up from the panel, wondering at the rate of chasing light and what the panel was telling him.

      “Yes, Hitoshi, I’m following you.”

      “We’ve company.”

      “It may be good,” Atsumori said checking the self-panel and the message was not friendly.

      “I’m afraid I’m inclined to agree with you.”

      “You’re right, dear friend. They aren’t what we expected they were. And they are moving very, very fast.”

      “Yeah,” Hitoshi replied.

      “Would we able to lose them between these layers?”

      “The intensity of day makes us impossible, except how fast they can drive.”

      “Let us try, Hitoshi,” Atsumori said. “We still have 500 kilometers ahead of us.”

      “Let us do it.”

      They moved.

      Their flyers began to swim beneath their own forces and like a classic example of turbo compulsion they jumped ahead.

      For a few moments they were watching their panel and there was the message of Hitoshi.

      “What do you think? We made it?”

      “I think we did it, and now we can find a place to eat and rest.  I do believe we have gone too fast from our destiny.”

      “We must think it twice, Atsu.”

      “What was that?” When Atsumori was about to relax as he prepared to search for a place, he saw the message of Hitoshi. “Who are they?”

      “You told me,” Hitoshi replied humorously. “You’re the human here.”

       Atsumori sent to them friendly messages and none had come back. “Let us send them some international codes.”

      None.

      Amazing the battalion was closer enough to hear its frequency, and a moment later, they were in a hassle welcome position to Atsumori and Hitoshi.

      “They’re indeed not friendly at all, Hitoshi.”

      “I can feel it.”

      “So, let us welcome, should we?”

      The entire spectrum of sky-boomer flyer closed in like an egg case and sent Atsumori flat backward, which controlled the next following aspect of a machine, that it had become a lethal weapon never see before. Atsumori then dropped automatically onto a thick medal box which was used to hold the very radioactive function of his new warfare devise and it became an amazing discovery known only to the world below. Its effectivity was brutal and self-generated, which they delivered a row of nonstop of 1,000,000 seeds, which they were self-efficient carrying within them singles destructors or self-bullet components.

      While he was moving in and out destroying these creatures, but the creatures did not leave them alone. Now in numbers, with self-centered commander’s brain, exploring any possibility to destroy Atsumori’s and Hitoshi’s defense.

      They came in multiple forces, in high level, hitting below and above, passing rocks, which Atsumori’s voice heard in front of this battle.

      “Are you with me, dear friend?”

      “You bet!”

      They were doing just fine, making them to be aware a new force had reached the surface. The creatures had another weapon. It was a kind of pierced atoms; they had expelled them and reached the well-protected skin of the sky-boomer flyer, and then there they began to drill through the zona of the sky-boomer flyer.

      “Be careful, Hitoshi,” Atsumori observed. “They try to drill through the sky-boomer’s skin and melt it, which will be impossible.”

      “Thanks, but I got it.”

      Atsumori called up for another device.

      “Activate it, please.”

      It was a frozen chemical in contact melting designed and became its own property of destruction; one called it genes. After they had succeeded, Atsumori reported it to Hitoshi as he had done the same.

      “Release it, please!”

      Now, in defense, Atsumori let the machine to self-analysis mold. It became stronger and lethal.

      While this was going on in the second layers, a 40-mile deep in a canyon, which one could see through crystal panels, studying the movements of long-borned earwig beings, known as Earwig Beings to the second world, Kiono and Tsuyoshi were watching the war among them.

      They were quiet, recognizing the danger and at the same time the maneuvers of Sky-Boomer Flyers.

      “They’ll die under their weapons.”

      “We don’t know who they, Kiono.”

      “What if they are here to get help?”

      “From whom I may ask? Everyone has vanished after the last attack of Zukutmu. There is nothing left.”

      “Except them, Tsuyoshi,” she replied as her face flushing with indignation. “They aren’t enemies, they are friends. They’re fighting against Earwig Beings, Tsuyoshi. What are afraid of?”

      “I am not afraid of anything, Kiono, and you know it!” he said sticking out chin defiantly. “Kiono! Kiono! Where are you going? Kiono!”

      Quickly, the sixteen-year-old Kiono commanded herself and her body transformed in an interstellar suit and jumped ahead. At the same time, her feet became two fins and closed them in and out to make her movement among the intensity of the air easy and efficient. Her arms, her hands, and her body became weapons, laser, sending those thin red lights directly to Earwig Beings and killed them instantaneously.

      Tsuyoshi could not wait. He jumped out onto the air and at the same time his sixteen-year-old body twisted one, twisting two and turning this way and that, because of the density of light, and then he became a kind of s-shaped being and headed where the action was.

      “Hey, Hitoshi!”

      “I’m below you.”

      “We’ve more company.”

      “Are you kidding me?”

      “No.”

      “Are they trying to hurt us?”

      “Let me see.” Atsumori commanded panel visualization; then he assumed him. “No, I don’t think so.”

      After a long intense of bullets, lasers, and seeds calmed had arrived.

      But Atsumori did not receive yet a good signal from them.

      After a few minutes of contemplation Kiono changed her warlike expression and held herself elegantly several feet from Atsumori and Hitoshi. Tsuyohi, not far away from her, who still wearing his armor, slipped next to her. He was already, for he had displayed himself a little below.

      “What do you think, Hitoshi?”

      “You go first.”

      “Thank you a lot,” he said. “I thought you’ll be the first to smell friendship.”

      “Not at this time.”

      Atsumori brought back his sky-boomer flyer on a man’s position, while Kiono displayed her message. There was a sober look on Atsumori’s customarily jovial face.

      “We come in peace,” he said. “My name is Atsumori and this is my friend Hitoshi.”

      The real face of Kiono displayed and Atsumori could not be more pleased to see her real features, which they were pretty and pleasant.

      “My name is Kiono and he is my brother. His name is Tsuyohi.”

      “It’s nice to meet both of you,” he said. “Thank you for your help.”

      “We thought you were part of them.”

      “Mercy, no!”

      “Where did you come from?”

      “From below, we’re the hominid.”

      “Hominid?” Tsuyoshi asked who still holding his warlike attitude. “We thought everyone has been killed from the last raider.”

      “No, a few of us has survived,” Atsumori replied. “What was most disliked was we lost touch of walking between the frozen water and it was not for some worse tricks, we were able to recover a piece of human. You can see it has not enough.”

      “Why are you here now?”

      “We’re here to reach Cyrix.”

      “Why! It’ll be impossible. No one has able to reach there. Not either the Crossing of Vryn.”

      “Well, that’s why we are here.”

      Kiono and Tsuyoshi exchanged looks, and Kiono said:

      “Would you be efficient enough to reach there?”

      “We do not know how to get there, but this is our mission and there will be no one who is going to break it.  First, we need to rest and get some to eat.”

      There was a silence.

      “You aren’t capable to reach out Crossing of Vryn, and besides you already have made a lot of noisy.”

      “Truth! But that wasn’t our intention,” Atsumori replied. “I think your sister must have a lot a confidence on you.”

      “How did you know? My thought has been blocked out, so I spoke only what I wanted you to hear.”

      “Maybe here, but I still have a system to track them.”

       Kiono looked at her brother and stepped a little toward Atsumori, who more and more pleased about Kiono’s refined expression of her face.

      “We’ve a place below stream.”

      “Sister!” Tsuyoshi’s eyes took on a hunted look. “That’s our only getaway!”

      “Please, brother,” she said as she glanced at Atsumori. “You and your friend will find a safe place to rest and nutrient food to eat.”

      “Don’t worry, Tsuyoshi, after we have finished eatking and resting, we’ll leave in peace.”

      “No!”

      Atsumori glanced at her. “Excuse me?”

      “We’re going with you.”

      “Wait! That isn’t our plan, Kiono.”

      “Well, no place or no food.”

      “We’re adept to find food by own sense.”

      “Not on this density, Atsumori. It’ll be months.”

      Atsumori consulted Hitoshi and they believed it had passed already three months of their last nutrition, even though their body had not yet ask for food, they recognized it was a wise choice to supply it, and when he passed to Hitoshi his conclusion on the choice, he received Hitoshi’s replied and it was a positive one.

      Slowly, Atsumori glanced at her. “Very well, Kiono,” he said. “But I don’t know Tsuyohi’s decision.”

      “He has agreed already.”

2

“But you’re a dog!” Kiono gawked in disbelief when Hitoshi removed his protected mask like a crystal ball.

      “What did you expect, Kiono, a human?”

      Atsumori laughed with gusto, so Tsuyoshi and Kiono.

      “I’ve never seen a dog after the last destruction, nor even a bird, which I like.”

      Atsumori looked down at Hitoshi. “My father found him almost dying ten years ago below the third level and he thought he would not make it.”

      “What happened?”

      “I was five years old and I wanted him, so my father made him a new out of him.”

      “How good is he?”

      “He just needs only to talk actually. My father tried—” Atsumori interrupted himself as he kept drinking the nutrient of iron from the rocks.

      Kiono considered him for a moment and she said:

      “What happened to your father then?”

      He looked at her. “Everyone was killed, except a few of us.”

      “I’m sorry,” Kiono said.

      “Thank you,” Atsumori murmured.

      “We could not say the same.” Atsumori and Hitoshi paid attention to Tsuyoshi sucking a handle of green frozen leaves, who was still having his mask on. “We believe our mother was taken to Cyrix or somewhere else when the Zukutmu people killed our father and the others. We’ve done a miserable job, though to track her down.

      “Are there more left?”

      “One by one, they began to move out or disappear,” Kiono replied touching her brother’s hand over his protected glove. “We’ve even visited the dangerous level of Chiyoko and nothing.”

      “Do you believe she may be in Cyrix?”

      “I do.”

      Atsumori looked at Tsuyoshi.

      “How did you know?”

      He smiled. “I got that feeling she is alive,” he said. “You’re not the only one who possesses that quality, you know, Atsumori.”

      “I’m glad.”

      There was a message from Hitoshi. Kiono and Tsuyoshi were unable yet to decode it out.

      “Who is that message?”

      “It’s coming from Hitoshi. He has sent it to me on a personal link. Sorry.”

      “Ah!”

      “He’s the way he can communicate.”

      “Well, let me to generate it,” Kiono said generating it into her system, which it was a link to Hitoshi’s generator communication system.

      “Thank you, Kiono.”

      “Oh, you are welcome.”

      “What I say we can explore the two possibilities. Of course, if Atsumori does not have any objection.”

      “Which is?” Kiono asked.

      “Let’s explore Cyrix and Chiyoko.”

      “But reach them we must conquer the Crossing of Vryn,” Kiono answered. “That will be a hell of drive.”

      “Besides,” Tsuyoshi observed, “Atsumori hasn’t told us yet what the reason he has to go to Cyrix.”

      “It’s to get the riddle box.”

      “You’re talking about the Hideki Tablet?”

      “How did you know exactly its name?”

      “Our mother has mentioned it to us once,” Kiono replied. “She was a low level in the City of Chiyoko, I believe now she had spoken the truth about it. She mentioned also there was the code of changing.”

      “She may be right,” Tsuyoshi said. “This could have some connection, isn’t it?”

      There was a silence.

      Slowly, Tsuyoshi’s downy mask pulled back, and it revealed a yellow of skin that appeared being blanched out, but by then his lacking in skin pigmentation, also known as achromasia seemed to dominate his handsome face.  His sister smiled at him and she turned her face toward Atsumori. She might have expected him to comment on her brother’s face, but instead he smiled at her and began to absorb the richness of the solid iron from the matter.  She appreciated it so it was Tsuyoshi who had noticed the coolness of Atsumori.

      “You’ve seen it before, haven’t you?” Kiono asked.

      At other times he had the mood and patience to make himself understood, and he would explain the destructibility of his sister, and then he was most horrible to see, for his own eyes her skin blemishing and her gaze hung about him like a blue-black eagle until she disappeared from his head. Yet all his people might have forgiven that episode of his mother and his father and her and he might have sworn before his only relative Aoi, he was going to follow the rule of a good citizen and to restore the energy power, were it not for some worse thought, he had promised to his mother he was going to avenge his sister’s dead what Raiden’s son had done.

      He nodded and he said:

      “My sister.”

      “Then you’ve more to gain in this mission, Atsumori.”

      He did not reply to her. Nor could an alarm be raised because Atsumori had closed all his communication including the channel to his friend Hitoshi, so that, try as Kiono would, neither word nor feeling would come.

3

Some minutes later they were on their move with steady speed, while Atsumori’s perception, he had presumed Kiono and Tsuyoshi would be left behind, and they would slow he and Hitoshi down.

      Kiono and Tsuyoshi had emerged unpredictable. They combined prowess, such as visibility of weapons like laser and thrown knives and something connected to their body.

      There was very pleasant among them to change partner. One moment there was Tsuyoshi and Atsumori, especially when he tried to know more his sister Hitomi was, but he pretended to be distant, though he was aware of his request. Sometime there was Hitoshi or Kiono, who had learned quickly to communicate with him, or Atsumori and Kiono, which their communication appeared frozen among them when they traveled together.

      Alone, after 1000 kilometers in full above the naked rocks, with Kiono, Atsumori glanced at her staring out of the sky as she knew the basic principles for decades of stars and the celestial bodies; Kiono still did not yet grasp exactly what determination when at what rate she could evaluate where she was.

      “What do you mean?”

      “Do you think we are below or above those stars?”

      “I think we are below?”

      “How did you figure it, Atsumori?” she asked. “If you reach below, you will see the stars are below.”

      “I should not attempt to demonstrate it, Kiono,” he said. “We’re moving below. Remember, I’ve come from those layers.”

      “You’ve problem to see it.”

      “They must be above us, Kiono,” he replied grimly. “We’re always coming from below and there is no another channel to reach it as a second or third level.”

      “But you’re not sure.”

      He took a deep breath and looked at her inside her interstellar suit. “No. I’m not sure.”

      As she sped up a little, in full position before him, she said: “Aren’t you scared, just a little bit, if there is some truth about it?”

      He saw her eyes and he noticed she did not cover them with the third protective film, and he recognized they were almond-shaped, having rainbow-like shifting colors which depending on the angle they’re seen from; well, he thought they were light purple or pale green. Whatever they were, Atsumori recognized they were pretty and he did not remember he had seen those eyes before.

      “Are you listening to me?”

      “Yes, of course, I am,” he replied. “I’m plenty scared not to think otherwise,” he ended badly, with a nervous smile.

      “My brother conceives I worry too much. Perhaps, I am.”

      She turned upside down, for she would dive and very cool, and she headed forward leaving him behind.

      Yet still he dreamed about Kiono’s eyes colors, smiling and throwing his sky-boomer forward, and this he did it like a bullet, well, just for fun.

      They went as far as the second world of bedrock, which Atsumori insisted, because the readable panel was telling him the ground would be fused and tempered air would reach below canyon’s interior in fire, and it would be better to move zero ten to avoid the dangerous ground.

      There was a brief discussion among Kiono and him, producing the same debate with Hitoshi and Tsuyoshi.

      “We were following you, Atsumori,” Kiono observed. “You should follow it in accordance with your plan.”

      “We understand such mistake will occur when the temperature of the air near the ground is zero, which this temperature decreases to 300°C below four kilometers altitude, our panel will have no problem to read it accordingly.”

      Kiono loved over the strain dials on her control panel, that was two by two the needle was waving toward the dangerous zone point, but there was another atmospheric effect due to particulates she had not sensed it yet.

      “I was reading it from a human perspective, which I notice it until now, but again it could be readable.”

      Atsumori grinned tolerantly. “The human body, like any object at a temperature above zero kelvins radiate energy will react. You aren’t alone, Kiono, even Hitoshi will react, too.”

      “What are you going to do? We’ve waste 2,000 kilometers.”

      “Let us try to reach the first level,” Hitoshi suggested.

      “It will be hard to get the 12th level, Hitoshi.”

      “What about to move around the bedrock. We can do it in 6.8 minutes.”

      Atsumori and Kiono contemplated the vast flat land and those layers around the mountainous lopes, and Kiono said:

      “That is danger, brother, we don’t have a full suspension sky-boomer flyer like Hitoshi and Atsumori had.”

      “We can’t stay here and do nothing.”

      “Listen up! Let me suggest the follow.”

      “What it will be?”

      “Everyone of us can see from this part of view of the bedrock’s crust appear of a spherical shell of basaltic rock or something else, which the vast blocks of granitic rock that make up the base large but thin from this angle, so we can move directly to it with all our force. I can make a hole and you and your brother follow.”

      “What is going to happen, Atsumori,” Kiono observed, “when its subterranean heat and the pressure from it explode? It’s going to collapse over us.”

      “We’re capable to male it on 2.5 seconds, Kiono, and we, Hitoshi and I, have seen you two have speed.”

      “Tsuyoshi?” Kiono inquired to her brother. “Do you agree?”

      “I can see it’s the only solution.”

      “It would have to be a fifty-fifty probability, Atsumori,” Kiono reminded him. “I can see now my brother has made his mind on you.”

      “It’s the only explication, unless we can reverse it backward.”

      Kiono moved toward him, and she said:

      “We’re dependent on you.”

      “I know.”

      Atsumori held his gaze back over and smiled.

      “What is going on?”

      “What, Hitoshi?”

      “The subterranean has begun to heat.”

      “Impossible!”

      A heat-repulsion was bubbling from inside out.

      “Oh, yes.”

      “It may be a volcano.”

      “No, no, no.”

      With an enormous variety of explosion below the surface could be as big as some the field ahead of them. Then this massive attachment to rocks emerged, while their heat-repulsion appeared, had knocked down a lot of rocks, and then it broke off.

      “What is that?”

      “Whatever it is they do not humans,” Tsuyohi replied to his sister.

      Kiono and Atsumori shifted to Hitoshi, who was moving back over the softer ground. Hitoshi communicated but they seemed impossible to decode his message, just as the process of this unknown massive broke in full, and a thousand of torpedoes or rove beetles or silverfishes split in a matter of seconds.

      “Holy Mercy!”

      Then they popped out, in lethal formation, and like the sheer weight of still others followed them.

      Atsumori, Kiono, then Hitoshi and Tsuyohi jerked instinctively from the friendly protective suits that closed to the lethal ones. In the motion, Atsumori’s sky-boomer carelessly brushed against one of Kiono’s arm. Her body seemed to react and a 25-lightbulb reached Atsumori, but his sky-boomer flyer self-thinking react for him, changed speed to avoid the fatal blow.

      “It’s not me, Kiono!”

      “Sorry.”

      “It was too close.”

      Atsumori’s sky-boomer flyer veered on its self-brain capacity, balanced and plunged out of control for a minute then it headed to the spherical shell of the basaltic rock. A first self-bullet reached it, grained rocks sparkled out of its base, speckled in color and full of relativity large particles of different lethal rocks moved everywhere if they were beings.

      “Be careful!”

      “Yes, they can kill you.”

      Just Hitoshi, Kiono, and Tsuyoshi were closer to him, in a distance of 100 yards, and Atsumori hit once more in the process, the massive, now in double formation, followed them, too.

      They passed through.

      “Keep on! Keep on!”

      “What are you going to do, Atsumi?” Kiono asked halting herself elegantly on the air.

      “Go!”

      “No, way!” Kiono exclaimed.

      “We’re here together,” Tsuyoshi replied.

      “It’ll not happen,” Hitoshi messaged.

      “Okay.”

      The massive, in pair, split, was moving like those silverfishes or rover beetles, with the same property of its antecedents, fast-moving, light-shy silverfish clone, coming in thousands toward them.

      Tsuyoshi, first, then Hitoshi, looked off. In control, Tsuyoshi changed into his second weaponry system, that later settling of other things could be accounting very neatly for his own good. His movements were majestic, which Hitoshi could not hesitate to follow him.

      A silverfish’s component was fired, nothing than a brutal evidence of magna, sending him several miles away. His sister screamed, feeling her heart pounding, and a moment later, he reappeared with the immense forces on display. So far he was not really hurt, although it seemed as though he were breathing fire. He was pissed off, and he was in and out around Rover Beetles and Silverfishes, destroying them, making them mad, too.

      “Gosh! He’s really angry!” Atsumori observed.                                                                             

      “You cannot play off with him when he is mad, Atsumori,” Kiono said smiling at him archly.

      Atsumori caught her double meaning and grinned lovely.

      “I won’t make that mistake, believe me?”

      “Good!”

      The confrontation lengthened a 60-minute battle, and after that they moved very fast from this place.

4

They reached the other side of the vertical cracks in ten-solid layer of the world.

      “This place must be American land,” Tsuyoshi said.

      “No, this has to be Mongolia; the vast terrain has the same characteristic.”

       “I haven’t any difference, Atsumori. Everywhere we look at has the panoramic view of rocks and empty hands.”

      “You don’t forget below these enormous layers and beneath these canyons they may have people.”

      “Truth, Atsumorio.” She added: “Tsuyoshi and I have never reached this part.”

      “None of us either, Kiono,” Hitoshi said above her.

      “I haven’t seen any water yet,” Tsuyoshi observed.

      “You won’t, Tsuyoshi. It may be 350,000 miles below or longer.”

      “I wish to touch once.”

      “You will one day, brother.”

      “Yes, one day,” Atsumori echoed.

      All around them in full flat now was the primordial ocean converted of grains in suspension as they had previously seen and at the same time was still a subjected weather to lower temperature. In fact, they were over the water and a moment later they were flying on Russian territory.

      They knew danger was everywhere and something had to precipitate out fast because there could not be a second chance.

      “Have we lost the way of Cyrix?” Tsuyoshi asked.

      “No, Tsuyoshi, but you must remember we are moving around it. We agreed not to go backward.”

      “Right!” he replied. “You suppose to see a signal.”

      “In accordance to out theory, we should see first Crossing of Vryn, and if that is correct it is a directed point, we presume we are on the right pathway.”

      “I got your point, Atsumori.”

      “Everyone cares for a little snack?” Kiono suggested.

      “Not in this moment, Kiono,” Atsumori said. “I don’t like this place.”

      “Think of it, I don’t like it either.”

      Tsuyoshi spoke again. “Don’t you think we’ll be all right?”

      “I think so, Tsuyoshi.”

      “That I’m afraid of,” Tsuyoshi replied.

      “I am with Tsuyoshi, Atsumori,” Hitoshi texted a message.

      “So far, it’s flat, and we can see beyond 200 kilometers.”

      They were able to see through their special visors as the horizon become smaller itself into this mass of light. They were capable to distinguish a 500-kilometer lane long and up to 120 kilometers wide, but they knew it was a realistic illusion because the danger could be inside the phantasmagoric shadows.

      “Keep your eyes, guys,” Atsumori claimed.

      Unhurried but irritable, the shifting currents of air and dried water gradually near away the last oxygen, producing familiar aspect of lack of breath, which their own reservation had doubled.

      “The air is thin,” Kiono said.

      “Eventually, the air will be gone around here.”

      “I can feel it,” Tsuyoshi said.

      Below, now leaving flat landscapes, then rolled trails of gigantic bedgrounds, and eventually nothing else to see, they looked ahead.

      “I am not seeing a thing ahead,” Tsuyoshi said.

      “Are we on the same route, Atsumori?” Kiono asked.

      “Our map route is 1000 percent accurate.”

      “Can you figure how many day-hours are?”

      “It must be night and around 3 in recycle time.”

      “How exactly?”

      “My body knows.”

      “I feel it too, but I thought you are restored.”

      “Oh, no, Kiono, I can control it. This is the beauty of medical science.”

      “Can we rest a little?””

      “Yes. It will be good for our system, and not what you have been asked previously for a snack.”

      She smiled. “Perhaps my body has said so to get attention.”

      “Let us find a place.”

      “I found me,” Tsuyoshi said.

      “He’s going to speed up, Atsumori.”

      “No problem. I’ll not miss it.”

      “Are you sure?”

      “Oh, yet, Kiono. Hitoshi?”

      “I heard it.”

      Kiono smiled at Atsumori. “Just how long you are going to keep up with me?”

      “You tell me, Kiono.”

      Atsumori twisted around himself too fast that there was a thick tail like a stream and jumped out of ahead her, while Hitoshi and Tsuyoshi already had disappeared; now Kiono, closing herself into her own self-suit, smiled.

      “Boy!”

      A moment later, Kiono was beside him. She smiled.

      “How it was?”

      “About what?”

      “Nothing.”

      “Are you testing, me, Atsumori?”

      “Who? Me? Nap!’

      “You are!”

      “Well, yes, a little.”

      “Guys, we have before us the Crossing of Vryn.”

      “How that possible!” Kiono said.

      “My calculation has to be reversed.”

      “Well, there it is.”

      Before them there was a billion-year-old volcano outpouring of lavas and gases originate mantles upper boundary. The magna molting rock and bedrocks Atsumori never had seen it before and it squeezed them upward, making thick walls of unbreakable forces. Completely unknown, it created a magnetic cage with the same waste, making the 3,500 kilometers up and down, east, west, north, south a curtain rather unstoppable at 5,500 kilometers. This circle, called by Atsumori’s people the magnetosphere, fanned out into a thick tail of protons and electrons beyond.

      “Now what?”

      Atsumori was gasping in the hot hair of the boundary of Closing of Vryn; his face scarlet and shining, but he took a careful look through his incorporated mas make it right.

      “Someone has manipulated it, Kiono,” he said.

      “Who may be? It has been since our mother has disappeared.”

      “No, someone has the ability to do so.”

      “You’re not suggesting Zukutmu has done this, Atsumori,” Tsuyoshi said.

      Atsumori looked at Hitoshi when he had to him a message not to revealing the last secret and then he looked back at Kiono.

      “Not him, but his father.”

      “His father? How did you know he has a son?”

      “No, his father is Raiden, and Zukutmu is his son. He and I have the same age, sixteen or seventeen.  He has become a second force behind his father’s madness and he has done what was left below.”

      “Oh, Atsumori!” Kiono looked at him. “Why didn’t you tell us that before?”

      “I am telling you now, Kiono? It’s important you and your brother understand.”

      “Not the way I see it.”

      “Are telling us that Zukutmu, that naughty boy, has to do with our mother’s disappearance and our people?” Tsuyoshi asked.

      “I am not sure, but there is the probability he has done with that. He always likes to impress his father.”

      “You have come all the way with that secret, haven’t you, Atsumori, and not that silly Hideki Tablet?”

      Slowly, he told her the other half of his story, and he mingled himself with the whispering of the heat from the volcano, or shaded passages what he had witnessed where his heart had become of steel. “I love Zukutmu no less than he loves me, and we, Hitomi, Zukutmu and I, were very close to our feeling, but Zukutmu had grown impatient before Hitomi. He accuses her of loving me more than him, and all that could be done to make him happy we did. As him, there was no pleasure in his day if she was not given the attention he needed.”

      “Then, she was half-sister of Zukutmu,” Kiono said.

      “When my father died, we have fallen into a hole of desperations and despairs, and my mother had fallen in love with that handsome young man, who has a son. Zukutmu was immediately struck with jealousy, and so was his father, who has loved my mother during his relationship with father. Both of them grew in rage.”

      Kiono and Tsuyoshi came over to Atsumori, and Tsuyoshi said, “How much hatred this Zukutmu?”

      “What he has done with my sister?”

      “He took her and made off her a monster.”

      “Like me?” Tsuyoshi asked icily.

      “No, Tsuyoshi. He was able to bleaching her face to expose her under the cold air.”

      He screamed and then he stared at him. “Is she dead or alive, Atsumori? Please, don’t me lie, hear me?”

      Kiono looked at her brother, admiring such suddenly passion had been born from him, which she never had seen it before.

      “We don’t know, Tsuyoshi. By the time I reached the place, I see only a glimpse of what he has done.”

      “He will be mine, understand? He’s going to pay what he has done to our mother and your sister.”

      It was a never-ending pleasure now in his heart, which Atsumori and Hitoshi admired.

      “What about Raiden?” Kiono glanced back at him. “How is he?”

      “He’s a genius monster?”

      “What he has done really?”

      “What he did, and beyond that, there is more. I am here to stop him and to avenge my mother and father. I have no doubt he has to do with my father’s death.”

      “First, how are you going to accomplish it before this?”

      “I’m capable to move over this, but I’m afraid you and your brother will face difficulty.” 

      “Let us worry about that. If you made it, I know we will.”

      Atsumori took a moment to watch her, and he knew there was no nonsense across her pretty face, and when he looked back at Hitoshi, his message was clear enough.

      “Let’s do it.”

      Atsumori sent back his sky-boomer flyer that seemed to create another dimension of its property, blocking it slowly. Now, flat, driving to itself, Atsumori was pulled backward, and then it closed completely in dark. The whole layout was now shinning, that was indeed magnetic lights.

      Kiono and Tsuyoshi felt the heat, then a puff of friendly protons and electrons from its skin, which Kiono and Tsuyoshi could hear him.

      “If you stay exactly 50 feet from us you are able to cross it by incorporating our radiation. I saw Tsuyoshi used the same but reverse, and I do believe you have it as well.”

      “Yes, our mother has designed it for us.”

      “Then, we are on the same track. Remember, you will have to speed at the same time with us. It will be an abruptly speed at 70,000 kilometers since the travel life will be past this. Understood?”

      “Understood.”

      “Ready, Hitoshi?”

      “Ready.”

      “Kiono?”

      “Ready.”

      “Ysuyoshi?”

      “Ready.”

      “On five.”

      5, 4 3, 2, 1.

      Kiono and Tsuyoshi felt an immediately push with the fact that the entire body of them seemed to be attached to Atsumori’s sky-boomer platform flyer, and it pulled them with remarkable speed in 5,000 in a fraction of second, and with that forceful push, they were flying like the speed of light.

      Kiono’s protective mask across her second film of her skin quickly changed automatically, her body, experiencing a new threat, closer in, which the entire spectrum of her and her brother seemed to experience another dimension of other beings.

      A length of 1,000,000 seconds seemed to extend endlessly when they reached the other side, and hundred in seconds later, they held on the air, looking back at the inferno.

      “We did it!” Kiono said cheerful.

      “Look!”

      A 950,000 kilometers away to the standard on a running field, up, there was Cyrix.

      It was surrounded by unloader rides up and down on roots, guiding the scarps of its own foundation into one part of its own dimension.

      “This thing comes from above, and I think Atsumori was right. It seems to feed the volcano.”

      “Yes, brother,” Kiono observed. “Someone has been able to manipulate it.”

      “Zukutmu’s father.”

      “Or he,” Tsuyoshi said. I’ll not stop to find him and to crush him!”

      Several kilometers from its magnificent structure, there were the gadgets like Rove Beetles in thousands, and before them, in layers, Footshopper beings. There was another formation of black shadows.

      “They are too many to close in.”

      “We must cross it, Kiono,” he said. “Hitoshi?”

      “I listen.”

      “Make it happens, buddy.”

      Hitoshi’s sky-boomer platform flyer jumped out of ahead of them, a few kilometers from the first formation, with remarkable regularity, he dropped a kind of light or ring. Inside these rings attached with the lights, with the plausible of protons. Mysteriously, they had become a self-meteorite and he said, “I’ve fun with this, so let us move.”

      He spoked to Kiono. “You will break that side, and please, be careful with these rings, okay?”

      “I hear it.”

      “Ysuyoshi,” he called him and said, “that part is belonging to you. This is mine. Let us roll in.”

      Quickly, they moved. In the first try, a dozen, with a pair of one thousand, was gone.

5

In the meantime, Zukutmu, vexed by the arrival of Atsumori and his companions, and the losing of thousands from his gadgets, walked from the Crystal Visor Room to the bridge that was leading to the other district of Cyrix on the opposite side. As he passed the controlled Magic Salon he looked up. His father but all his gestures held when he saw his impressive face of his.

      “Father!” he said. “They are here. Please, say something. That magnetic game has done a thing to hold them back.”

      At this particular moment, a made-up human appeared.

      “Zukutmu!”

      “Not now, Yuuto.”

      “It’s about Hitomi. She refuses again to eat.”

      “Then, you must force to eat. You do whatever it takes.”

      “Yes, Zukutmu!”

      He backed up and disappeared.

      “Father!”

      “I heard you twice, son, and my reply he would not make it.”

      Suddenly they heard noise and then Atsumori’s voice.

      “You’re wrong, Raiden!”

      First it was a shadow, that was building extended to its very skin and from it the figure of Atsumori appeared.

      “How did you able to create it! I destroyed it with your father’s vision! I destroyed every piece of tablet.”

      “It’s not unjust to have a father such as how to teach me.”

      There was a dozen of clone being pushed by Hitoshi and his appearance made him to wonder.

      “Ah! He was able to transfer it to him.”

      “Bingo!”

      A moment later, Kiono and Tsuyoshi landed from above, bring with them a dozen of palace guards.

      “You!”

      “I’ve come here to get what is belonging to my father.” Quickly, Atsumori moved forward, but Zukutmu broke him off, and with the speed of light, Atsumori faced. “You don’t have anything to hold me, Zukutmu.”

      “I do.”

      “He’s mine, Atsumori!”

      “You supposed be dead Tsuyoshi and you, Kiono.”

      “I’m sorry to disappoint you, Zukutmu.”

      Just as Kiono, then Tsuyoshio jumped forward, while Hitoshi was playing on his panel, seeking for something.

      This time, Atsumori stepped off from his sky-boomer and quickly it became invisible.

      He commanded to Hitoshi to find Hideki Tablet.

      “That’s what I am trying. Oh, real human is moving in.”

      By the time he reached the floor, Zukutmu screamed. From Atsumori’s arms two swords emerged.

      Zukutmu had ended up with two handguns and he had begun shooting in repetition.

      Kiono and Tsuyoshi jumped off, just the second formation of guards moved in.

      Zukutmu had become a lethal, but he could not stop Atsumori. But he wanted to get his father and slowly had become to retreat.

      “Tsuyoshi!”

      He was fighting several feet from Atsumori and Zukutmu; the selective guards made him impossible to reach him.

      “Yes, Atsumori?”

      “I will give him to you as I promised you.”

      “He’s nothing,” Zukutmu cried out. “He’s a mutant!”

      “No, my sister will be very happy to know him.”

      “Nooo! Nooo! Hitomi is mine!”

      Zukutmu lost a moment; anger and frustration temporarily seemed to blind him, and Atsumori knocked directly to Tsuyoshi; while Tsuyoshi, his feeling had grown more, closed his suit and twisted and headed to Zukutmu.

      “You’ve missed him off!”

      Both, Tsuyoshi and Kiono headed to Zukutmu. Somehow, Kiono held as she saw Atsumori jumped to the second level where Raiden was moving.

      “Where are you going?”

      “You don’t have enough power to destroy me.”

      “With her and me, we can.”

      “You can’t kill me.”

      “We will,” Kiono said as she moved toward him; but she was pushed backward.

      “Be careful, Kiono, his body has magnetic impulses.”

      “Yes, I’m! I’m indestructible!”

      He began to punish Atsumori and Kiono in and out, sending them several in the air.

      Meanwhile, Zukutmu was bleeding from the first inside his protective suit, eventually, he removed his suit. He called for guards, and Tsuyoshi said:

      “You would look like her what you’d done with her face.”

      “You fool! She’s alive and mine!”

      There was a moment’s hesitation, just Zukutmu changed. His skin had taken this color and threw himself against Tsuyoshio.

      He jumped off, away from Zukutmu, and moved around the spacy room, not able to face him.

      “I’ll destroy you, as my father has destroyed your people, your mother, and every one to his path.”

      Suddenly, there was a message from Hitoshi, which he decoded it.

      “I find it, Atsumori,” he said. “Also, yes, she is, Atsumori. Hitomi is alive!”

      Quickly, Tsuyoshi commanded to himself and his special protective suit closed in. He turned and faced Zukutmu. Then encounter was brutal, and when Tsuyoshi reached the other side the room, Zukutmu was just a melted object.

      He looked at Hitoshi. “Where she is? Where?”

      “To these layers, Tsuyoshi!”

      On the opposite side, a little exhausted, watching Raiden, Atsumori and Kiono, who slowly got to their feet.

      “Can you understand me now? I am still here, and I’ll joy to see each one of you burning.”

      A bolt emerged from Raiden and gained unlock force; quickly, Atsumori commanded his sky-boomer, but already his sky-boomer had displayed its own generator and thick air appeared to embrace him and Kiono while a line of magnetic field popped out in lethal sequence.

      Raiden did not expect, and his protective suit had a second to react; he did not make it and the invisible force sent backward.

      Quickly, Atsumori and Kiono, who was still attached to him and from the sky-boomer’s self-protection communicator, reached the side of Raiden, and he stood there, just as Atsumori and Kiono made their wishes to come truth.

      “He is gone, Kiono.”

      Kiono smiled as she touched his face. “Yes, he’s gone.”

      “Hitoshi?”

      “Where is my brother?” Kiono asked. “Tsuyoshki?”

      “Hitoshi?”

      “We are here!”

      From below, protected and carried someone, Tsuyoshi appeared.

      “Who is that?”

      He looked at his sister and then back at Atsumori.

      “She’s Hitomi.”

      “Hitomi? It cannot be! It cannot be!”

      Tsuyoshi fled to the right and deposited gently on a flat rock. Quickly, Atsumori and Kiono moved over to her.

      “Yes, she is!”

      “It seemed she has refused to eat.”

      “How long?”

      “Months.”

      “Oh, no.”

      “Let me handle it, you boys wait outside.”

      “Where?”

      “Somewhere, I don’t care. I’ll be able to get her to her feet.”

      Atsumori and Tsuyoshki exchanged looks.

      “All right.”

      “Let us, Atsu.”

      “Including you,too, Hitoshi. Out!”

      “I thought it was only for human.”

      “You’re more than that.”

      They stood there for a moment and then they began to walk.

6

Hitomi looked at Tsuyoshi and she said, “Thank you.”

      “It’s nothing.”

      She took of delight to touch his hand over his protractive gloves. “You saved my life.”

      Tsuyoshi’s face flushed with happiness. “It’s a pleasure.”

      “Can I ask you a question?”

      “Sure.”

      “It’s true what my brother has said.”

      His face twisted in anguish, and he looked off where his sister and Atsumori were talking, he said:

      “I just want you remember me like this. It’s better.”

      “No, I want to see it.”

      “Please, Hitomi!”

      She came closer to him and touched his face.

      Slowly, his mask displayed, and he cast down his eyes to the ground.

      She lowered her finger under his jaw and made him to look at her. “I like that.”

      “Do you?”

      “I’m going to say as you have said to me without knowing me,” she said as her eyes danced into his. “You are very handsome, Tsuyoshi.”

      “Uh-hum.”

7

By the time they reached Closing of Vryn, the volcano had stopped and a sun had begun slipping off into the horizon.

      “Are you really going below?”

      He looked at his sister and Tsuyoshi several feet away listed to Hitoshi.

      “No, we need to find your mother. I think she must know to decode this Hideki Tablet.”

      “Then, you did not know really there was a Hideki Tablet.”

      “No, Kiono. I’ve come here to get him.” There was a precious grim of every part of the face. “I lied to you.  I am sorry.”

      There was a silence.

      She looked off toward her brother who was laughing and talking with Hitomi and Hitoshi and then she looked back at him.

      “I’m glad,” she said. “But you promise me there will be no secret and lies between us.”

      “I promise you.”

      “Now, tell me how many people are below.”

      “None, except my grandfather, Aoi,” he replied. “And he’s on that condition.”

      “Don’t you think my mother knows about it?”

      “She may.”

      “Where can we her?”

      “In the second level of the world,” Hitoshi said.

      They turned and Hitomi and Tsuyoshi nodded.

      “Well, which one?” Atsumori asked.

      “Let us our heat decides.”

      First, it was Kiono, then Atsumorio, and later on, Hitoshi.

      “Are you able to speed you?”

      “Is that a challenge, Tsuyoshi?”

      “Not ready, well yes.”

      So saying that Hitomi in seconds, though of this, Tsuyoshi, knew nothing, had disappeared before him.

      “Wow!”

      A moment later, he sped off.

      From far off in the third layer came the movement of rocks, and a shadow frozen, elegantly in the surface.