The Lost World is a novella from Grimoire NieR and Grimoire NieR: Revised Edition. Set three years after Ending D, its contents were adapted into Ending E of NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139....
Credits[]
Official translation from Grimoire NieR: Revised Edition.
Written by Yoko Taro[1]
Concept by cavia[1]
Translated by Casey Loe[1]
Characters[]
The Lost World ver.1.00[]
THE END IS NIER.
THE END OF NIER.
What a shit show, Kainé thought.
She didn't know what happened, other than that a shock wave from something had sent her hurtling through the sky like someone might toss away an old spoon. Unable to position herself to break the fall, she landed hard, managing a sloppy sort of roll that she pulled herself out of by planting one of her swords into the mechanical floor beneath her.
Yep. Total shit show.
But there was no way she was going to turn and run. No fucking way. She used the planted sword to pull herself up, then lifted the one in her left hand to eye level, using it as a kind of shield. First, she'd need to take care of—
The second wave hit. For a moment, the world went red as crimson spatter swirled around her like a whirlwind. An instant later it was followed by an explosion, sending debris dancing in the air.
Kainé finally understood what was hitting her: She was being blasted with high-pressure water that shredded her skin.
As she clung to her planted sword, waiting for the watery blades and thunderous roar to pass, a late-arriving piece of shrapnel smashed into her head. The sensations from the jagged wound and spurting blood passed beyond pain, leaving her feeling only cold.
Finally, the roar faded. Or maybe the thing just made me deaf, Kainé mused with a faint smile. Blood oozed from her eyes and nose, and her vomit spread through the surging stream like a tea bag dipped in water.
They're really gonna make a fight out of this... Tyrann would be thrilled if he were still around.
She gripped the hilt of her sword with a slick hand as fresh blood ran in rivulets from between her fingers. She took one deep breath and then another as she focused on her enemy:
The five Kainés who stood before her.
Two days earlier...
Kainé snapped awake in her crude tent, breath ragged, eyes wide, right hand slick with sweat. She sat that way for a long time, hoping for her pulse to slow. Unable to close her eyes again, she could only wait out the strange feelings of loss and confusion that were assaulting her.
That dream again.
She didn't know what the dream meant—she didn't even know what it was about. But whenever it came, it left her with overwhelming feelings of pain and sadness, almost as if something very important had been gouged out of her heart. Most nights, she woke with tears streaming down her cheeks.
How many times is this going to happen?
Kainé's heart overflowed with anger and irritation she had no way to expel. If it were a Shade, she'd just kill the thing and be done with it. But you can't kill a dream, and this one seemed to come around more and more often of late.
Her left hand was clutching her sword so tightly that her knuckles were white. She kept that hand free when she slept in order to respond quickly if a Shade attacked, but didn't realize it had grabbed one of her swords in the night.
At this rate, I'm going to end up accidentally killing somebody as I get out of bed.
Kainé shook her head. It was just a dream; there was no point in letting it spin her out of control. She got up and stepped out of her tent to find fog covering the plains. The wind brushing against her cheek told her not to expect the skies to clear anytime soon. She didn't see any of the sheep that usually roamed the area, which meant they were probably hiding. Smart move on their part—on a day like this, the chances of Shade attacks were even greater than normal.
Kainé's mouth twisted into a smile at the thought. What else could she do on a day like this but murder Shades? It was a great plan—the perfect way to cheer herself up. If she was bathing herself in Shade blood, she wouldn't have to think about anything. Pleased, Kainé grabbed her swords and prepared to set out.
Today she'd planned to visit the Forest of Myth.
No one had heard from the village in nearly a month—or at least that was the talk she'd overheard from a group of people near Seafront. Though she'd been curious, she wasn't the type to ask a bunch of follow-up questions; even with Tyrann gone, Kainé remained as unsociable as ever.
Tyrann...
Three years had passed since she'd parted ways with the Shade who once shared her body. The constant physical pain she felt had left along with him, but so had her ability to use magic. Her skill with blades and impressive physical strength, however, remained—and since she'd never been all that good at magic, she didn't miss it too much.
Yet why did Tyrann leave? Each time she tried to recall what happened, her thoughts went hazy, as if her brain had suddenly filled with fog. On rare occasions, she would feel like she was about to stumble on the memory, but it always disappeared like a mirage.
Kainé moaned as she clutched at her temples. Something had definitely happened, but what? She couldn't remember. She couldn't remember!
She swung a sword through the fog as hard as she could, cutting a brief gash in the mist before it slithered back together. In that moment, she told herself what she always told herself: it didn't matter. She wasn't the sort of person to sweat the details like that.
She slashed an X in the fog with her right hand, then sheathed the sword at her waist. Maybe there would be Shades in the Forest of Myth. So long as she was killing them, she wouldn't have to think about any of this shit.
Three years ago she'd saved a girl named Yonah. It was the same day she sent the Shadowlord to his grave. The day her own Shade disappeared. And the day the moronic plan of the "true" humans crumbled into dust.
Oh, but that wasn't the end. Having lost their lord, the Shades began launching haphazard attacks on people in an attempt to reclaim their bodies. If the whole "Project Gestalt" business those traitorous priests kept talking about was for real, then the world was drifting further and further from how it was supposed to be. Instead of reuniting, Gestalts and Replicants were murdering one another. And Devola and Popola—the priests who were supposed to be running the entire show—were both dead.
At any rate, the world was doomed. A battle that had begun as a quest to avenge her grandmother had ended with her killing the Shadowlord, killing a whole lot of Shades, and killing any hope she and all the other Replicants had for a future.
Eh, but who gives a shit?
As far as Kainé was concerned, killing Shades was reason enough to live. Her sword told her what to do now, and that was enough. Whatever happened to the world would happen—and until it did, she would keep fighting. She'd tell no one the truth, instead devoting herself wholly to the battlefield.
Sometime, somewhere, she would die. She knew this. But for now, she was content to mark time until that day arrived.
Kainé made it twelve steps past the stone gate that marked the entrance to the Forest of Myth before she sensed something amiss. She chalked up the delay to her naturally oblivious nature; a normal person probably would have noticed much sooner.
Everything she saw seemed to be a strange combination of flora and machine. Mechanical cables thick as tree branches writhed beneath her feet, while plants grew in spirals around machines, swirling down to the forest floor. Green oil dripped from branch-like protrusions. Serpentine vines with bizarre flowers bloomed from cracks in metal. Creepers of leaves coiled around steel to form trees that stretched into a canopy above. Kainé was at a loss to understand how such weird fusions of plant and machine had come to be, or how they could possibly function together.
Whatever this thing is, it sure ain't a forest.
Kainé innately understood that what she was seeing was irreconcilable with the world she knew, yet the calming smells of trees and nature made it all too real. The clash between such natural smells and unnatural sights made her uneasy, and she subconsciously reached up to touch the flower in her hair as if reassuring herself.
She'd heard the Forest of Myth was a misty, quiet place where silence was disturbed only by the voice of its loquacious mayor reverberating through the trees. The scene that lay before her, however, could not be further from that description. There was nothing that could possibly serve as a house, nor any kind of walkable paths between the confused jumble of plants and machines. In fact, there was no sign people had ever lived here at all.
In the distance, she spied the silhouette of a tree through the fog—one that was far larger than the others around it. Not having a better option in mind, she decided to make her way over to it.
The going was rough. Though Kainé had to climb a tree and cut through a length of pipe, she kept moving all the same. The sticky oil disgusted her. The smell of vegetation revolted her. Yet on some level, she felt this horrid place fit her nature; she'd never quite felt like she belonged in softly rolling plains or lush, beautiful forests.
Of course, that wasn't to say she liked the place. In truth, it was a series of hassles and annoying ordeals. With no clear paths, she was forced to make her own, which left her soaked with oil, sap, and who-knows-what other substances. She was thoroughly irritated with the entire affair, and found herself grumbling and cursing as she tromped through the slippery terrain.
As she approached the center of the forest, the scenery began to change. The strange fusions of plant and machine were still all around her, but they were growing smaller. The mechanical cylinders she'd seen near the entrance had been thick as her thighs, but these were no wider than a finger. The large plants with their huge leaves were also shrinking, and the intertwined cables and vines now resembled handfuls of noodles. Annoyingly, every surface was as slippery as ever, but with no need to clamber over fat vines and tree roots, she was making faster progress—which was good, because she'd grown so weary during her walk, she no longer had the energy to curse.
After crossing some twenty giant piles of machine-and-plant spaghetti, Kainé finally arrived at the roots of the great tree. The cables and vines really were thin as noodles at this point; the ground under her feet was a carpet of finely braided pasta, and the trunk of the tree was covered with the same. Hell, for all she knew, the tree might have been made of wires as opposed to simply covered with them.
Kainé looked around. All was silent. A firefly glided past, but nothing else stirred. Seeking to get a closer look at the great tree, she stepped onto its trunk.
Which is when it happened.
Sensing something, Kainé's hand flew to her sword. At the point where trunk met ground, cables began to squirm like a writhing mass of snakes. Their movements became more and more frantic, until streams of cable and ivy suddenly burst out of the earth itself. The freshly expelled cables wriggled and slithered around before converging at a single spot, then slowly wrapped around one another to form a deliberate shape: the silhouette of a human.
Looks like a boy, or at least the torso of one, thought Kainé as she gripped her sword tighter. The thing was affixed at the waist to a root of the great tree, its grassy skin and green metal glittering with an oily sheen. Plants with thin leaves even sprouted from its head in a crude approximation of hair.
The "boy" made an audible moan as he stretched out his arms and back. Then, as if noticing Kainé's presence, his expression abruptly changed.
"Ah," he began. "I am—"
Before the conversation could continue, Kainé's sword separated the boy's head from his shoulders, causing it to thud on the thick carpet of wire and scrap below. The pitiful thing quickly disintegrated into a series of squirming cable worms that frantically burrowed back underground, while the now-headless body unraveled and vanished from sight.
The mechanical forest was quiet again. Kainé could almost feel the pleasantly cool fog, thick against—
"My, my! You are a violent one!"
The voice was coming from above her. Kainé's eyes followed the great tree upward and saw the boy was now sprouting out of the trunk and looking down on her, parallel to the ground. Arms folded, he shook his head slightly as if indicating disapproval.
"Now then, shall we start by introducing ourselves?"
Kainé didn't answer, causing an awkward silence to descend on the forest. Neither one of them moved for the longest time. Finally, the boy, arms still tightly folded, shook his head again. "Well then, I suppose I shall go first. I am the administrator of this forest, and my name is κλΚ?Σ?χΗ?"
Kainé couldn't make out the sounds at all.
"Ah, yes," he continued. "I imagine your auditory range was not able to make much sense of that. In that case, please refer to me as you will: administrator, boy, or whatever. Also, I expect there are many things you do not understand. Which would you care to know? One: about this forest. Two: about me. Three: about the future. Make your selection."
He unfolded his arms and outstretched his palms as if welcoming her impending answer, but received only silence in return. Another firefly flitted between them, its tiny glow shining for a brief moment before vanishing into the fog.
"Very well. In that case, I will offer explanations in numerical order. One: about this forest. As you can see, this forest is composed of both mechanical and botanical elements, all of which are parts of a single machine that spans the entire forest. This machine is known as a 'computer,' although you are unlikely to understand what that term means. Furthermore, this computer was built from a fusion of quantum mechanics and Maso research, and is considerably more powerful than a conventional computer, with branches that stretch throughout the world, carrying information as light—"
Kainé swung her sword behind her, sending the two halves of the machine that had risen up there tumbling to the ground in a glittering spray of green oil. It had been almost cubic in shape, with short arms on either side; she remembered encountering robots just like it in the Junk Heap.
"This light information connects the world, allowing it to function as a single giant mind that—Oh! I apologize. It was not my intention to catch you by surprise there. I fear things are not happening in quite the order they were supposed to. But to conclude, this forest is the terminal that controls this region. However, as this region is now doomed, the termination of service has begun. That is what all of this is about."
"Termination of service?"
"Just so. Now then, you are, let's see... 'Kainé,' is it? I can find such knowledge easily, you see, because the computer before us is essentially a collection of information that holds everything about our world, including Project Gestalt. Oh, and I hope we can continue this discussion as you fight?"
She was completely surrounded by robots now—nothing but metal cubes as far as the eye could see. Rather than worry, Kainé opened her mouth and delivered her reply: "Sure, I can fight. It'll be a whole lot better than standing here listening to some dumb kid's boring-ass stories."
Kainé kicked a robot that suddenly dropped down from above, sending it flying with a satisfying burst of sparks. "This sort of thing is more my style, anyway," she said as she drew her second sword.
"Ha ha!" cried the boy. "Such spirit!"
Before he even finished the compliment, Kainé had sent four more robots flying. After smashing one behind her, she leaped over the rolling metal box as it showered sparks in all directions, then sank her blades into yet another, creating an explosive shock wave of smoke and fire. The sea of machines surrounding Kainé obscured her from view, but even from a distance, the continuous explosions made her position clear.
More and more robots began to join the fray, aiming for the head of the serpentine explosion trail, and Kainé was soon trapped under a small mountain of machines. Growing increasingly irritated by her inability to move freely, she ripped the armor off the nearest robot and stabbed what appeared to be a fuel pipe. She'd learned in past battles that severing those would cause the metal boxes to explode.
And explode they did, sending the robot pile flying in all directions. Kainé used their own iron plates to protect herself from the shock waves, then repurposed their blown-out frames as pedestals to rise above the sea of machines. Thus situated, Kainé eagerly went after her next target.
"Incredible work!" said the boy. "Truly, you have exceeded your Replicant limitations!"
Kainé scowled in response, then used a hand to bisect a nearby robot and a leg to kick a different one away. She leaped onto a third, using it to skillfully hop down a trail of robot heads as a swarm of missiles pursued her. She was yelling something, but the words—and any glimpse of her fleeing figure—were lost in the ensuing explosion as the missiles struck.
As the boy squinted in an attempt to locate her, she suddenly leaped out of the flames and sliced his face in two before he could even process what was happening. She kicked his skull apart for good measure, then leaped away, spouting insults and leaving his remains to be swallowed by the next barrage of incoming missiles.
Multiple small explosions went off one after another, producing spheres of heat and light across the area. Some of the missile-equipped robots were caught in the blasts and exploded, further increasing the damage. As if carried on the winds of the destruction, Kainé raced straight up the tree and leaped onto a nearby branch.
After losing her ability to use magic, Kainé's prowess with martial arts and her swords had only grown stronger. Her swords were no more powerful, but she more frequently attacked in ways that put her own life at risk. She did so emotionlessly, neither seeking thrills nor becoming intoxicated by her own strength. When people push things too far, they die, and Kainé fought like a woman charging straight at that truth.
Bangs flapping in the wind, Kainé looked at the ground below with a faint, placid smile. Thanks to the explosions and fires, the once-green forest now glowed crimson. Missile impacts had left the floor pocked with deep holes lined in shredded cables and vegetation. As she watched it burn, a glimpse of movement to her left caught her eye. A branch had begun to wriggle, and as Kainé watched passively, the boy from before sprouted out of it anew, giggling all the while.
"You know what all of this is for, right?" he asked, raising a hand to his mouth as if trying to suppress amusement. "It's to get rid of all of you.
"Project Gestalt is managed region by region, you see. When certain conditions are met, an entire region can be designated as a failure. At this point, we come in to clean things up and freeze the Gestalts until they can be rescued by people from another region. That's the protocol."
Kainé said nothing, keeping her eyes fixed on the carnage below. Her face flickered orange in the burning wind.
"The installation you people refer to as the Junk Heap was built for just such a purpose—for destroying Replicants. After which, this forest will expand out to envelop the entire region."
Below them, robots creaked and whirred as they begin to spew green bubbles around the area. They seemed to be attempting to douse the fires while simultaneously processing the wreckage of their fallen brethren.
"Then I just have to destroy it all," Kainé muttered. She then leaped gracefully to the ground, fixing her eyes on the boy as she fell.
"I'll kill you later!" she cried, which caused the boy to laugh. Despite the gracefulness of her fall, Kainé managed to channel the impact of her landing into an attack that sent the robots around her soaring. When she rose, she took advantage of the breathing room to stab her swords into the ground and slash them across it, severing cables and pipes to carve a circle into the surface—a circle with her at its center.
"It's too much hassle to figure out which of you fucks to kill first," she shouted, "so you metal crapheads can come to me! I'll cut you to fucking pieces the moment you cross this line, so let's dance, you oily green assholes!"
Kainé had three simple rules.
She was well aware of her natural inclination to violence, so whenever she drew her swords, she made herself follow these rules, no matter what.
The first rule: If it's a Shade, kill it. She wasn't a good enough person to forget or forgive that one of them murdered her grandmother. So if it was a Shade, it died. No exceptions.
The second rule: If it's hurting people, kill it. Whether it was a machine doing the attacking or some kind of wild animal, it needed to die. In the past, she hadn't used to care about people so much...
The third rule: If I don't like it, kill it. With this being the final rule, it was a bit unclear how well she actually held herself back.
Regardless, if a thing fell under one of the three rules, she gave herself permission to kill it—and these robotic shit giblets were definitely in violation of rules two and three, which was reason enough for them to die.
As promised, Kainé turned every machine that crossed the line into scrap-metal sashimi. They attacked her head-on and from behind. From the left and the right. From above and below. Whatever the direction, she stood her ground and coldly dispatched her foe with the least amount of effort necessary. Although the line she'd carved into the ground was no longer visible beneath mangled robot corpses, it was clear that not a single machine had managed to cross it in one piece.
She wasted nothing. Every leftover ounce of momentum in her swings was channeled to the next foe in line. As she brought a sword back from a swing, she'd cut into a new enemy along the way, all the while parrying the charge of yet another with her elbow. She fought off foes behind her without so much as a glance in their direction, using sound and intuition to tell her where to strike. To an observer, her attacks might have seemed random and flailing, but not a single one missed its mark. There was a rhythm and grace in the broad circles carved by her swords, and from a distance, the after-streaks of her blades appeared in the form of a beautiful sphere.
Nevertheless, after thirty minutes of fighting, Kainé found herself beginning to pant. The grace of her swings began to diminish, and she started taking more hits in return. But none of the machines had managed to land a life-threatening wound. Covered in blood and oil, she remained a source of pulsing heat amid the cold heart of the forest.
Suddenly, a much larger, two-legged, two-eyed model of machine emerged from the fog. Unlike the boxy units she'd been battling, it had humanlike proportions in its long arms and legs. She'd seen a machine like it before in the depths of the Junk Heap: a detestable creature ridden by a child Shade. The discomfort she'd felt on that day immediately came flooding back to her—or perhaps the Shade's scream had simply never stopped reverberating in her skull. Along with the discomfort came a sense she hadn't fought the machine alone, that someone had been at her side.
The pain of the fractured memory stabbed at her brain as the mocking laughter of a prepubescent boy reverberated throughout the forest. Kainé had no idea where the so-called administrator was at this point, but she could still hear his voice on the wind.
"He was important to you, wasn't he?" he asked. "Tell you what! If you can kill that thing, I'll tell you a secret."
Kainé was breathing too heavily to respond. She wasn't here to haggle anyway—she was here to kill. And her final victim would be the boy who didn't know when to shut up.
The robot she now faced was slightly different from the one she'd encountered at the Junk Heap. Its arms ended in giant pincers, and it had four lights as eyes, the combination making it look like a kind of deep-sea crab. That was fine with her; the less human an enemy looked, the less hesitant she felt about killing it.
The crab brandished a claw and charged, a move telegraphed so plainly even a child could have seen it coming. It chopped down with the claw while using the other to unleash a barrage of magical bullets. Kainé moved forward, showing no inclination to dodge either attack. Slicing through the bullets, she swung out with her right sword and lopped the pincer clear off, the afterstrike of her slashing combo rupturing the remaining bullets.
Okay, that's weird. It didn't feel... right.
The thought hit her a moment too late. Above her, within the remaining joint of the crab's severed arm, she saw a gigantic cannon, its magic circle already deployed and preparing to fire. It had been a twofold trap, and the bullets were already flying before she put it together.
The piercing sound of the weapon hit Kainé's ears as her body was battered by exploding bullets. The crab followed it up with a second barrage. The explosion was so powerful it lifted the creature off the ground, sending bits of cable and iron plating soaring.
Once this was done, the crab immediately raised its remaining pincer. The smoke was too thick to find its moving foe, so it brought the claw down on the last place she had been. But as the machine was attempting to reassess Kainé's position, it felt a strange pressure against its left arm. Before its processors could calculate what had occurred, a severed pincer slid off its forearm. The machine attempted to counterattack with the cannon, but it was sliced away before locking on to a target.
The crab turned in an attempt to flatten its attacker, but Kainé was faster, and a second later, the two halves of its body slid apart and fell to the ground, parting to reveal a bloodstained Kainé. Her left arm was twisted at the elbow in a strange direction, but a quick swing of the sword popped it back into the socket. The animal moan that followed reverberated amid the sound of roaring flames.
The boy nodded slowly. "Since you remain standing, I will give you a piece of information you lost. Recently, you have been burdened by a sense of a thing you can't remember, yes? A feeling that something is missing from your life? Well, I am going to tell you what that something is... just as soon as you defeat these."
Kainé slowly turned to look behind her and saw metal and plant woven into human form—five human forms, in fact. Their features were finely detailed, from their supple musculature to their ample breasts. Each arm ended in five sharply defined fingers wrapped around an ominous sword.
They were Kainé—they were her in all but flesh.
It took Kainé a moment to understand what she was looking at. But when she finally grasped that the automatons were copies of herself, her lips twisted into a fearsome grin.
She couldn't think of anyone else she'd rather be killing right now.
The five Kainés began blasting her with high-pressure water jets, sending her crashing into the great tree.
As she slid down its wire-coated trunk, debris from a shattered machine smashed into her arm. She howled then—a sound somewhere between a scream of pain and a shriek of anger.
What a shit show.
In the distance, she heard the boy prattling on. "These automatons are constructed from your own Replicant data. I made them even more capable than you. What do you think?"
Fuck this kid and fuck all his bullshit.
"Now on to topic two: about me. I am the administrator of this forest, a program designed to control its Maso and the effects of said Maso. But how to explain the concept of a program? ... Ah. Perhaps it would help for you to equate me to Grimoire Weiss, with whom you are acquainted. I can do anything you can conceive of. Gestalt and Replicant, life and death—all these things exist in the palm of my hand."
As Kainé pulled herself slowly to her feet, a hint of loneliness washed across the boy's face. "Why do I possess such power? That is a question I have pondered for a very long time. But I do not know the answer, for no one has told it to me."
The five automatons suddenly leaped at her.
Wait, I'm supposed to be fighting all these things at once? In this condition?
Though she could see no possibility of victory, the conditioned reflexes of her arm nevertheless began to do their thing. So long as she could fight, she very much intended to. She hurled the sword in her right hand into the face of the first automaton, leaping forward to drive the weapon home with a flying kick. Then, using the embedded sword as a step, she moved into a forward spin, delivering a sweeping slice to the abdomen of the next closest Kainé.
She'd intended to sever it in half, but the blade didn't make it all the way through. The automaton shuddered as green oil sprayed from its wound, but it didn't fall. A moment later, the four swords of the two Kainés behind it were upon her. As she made a desperate attempt to push them back, a crushing impact reverberated from her midsection—a kick from the final enemy.
After being punted back and forth for what seemed an eternity, Kainé finally tumbled along the ground. This time, she could not find the strength to stand again. She coughed out a mouthful of blood and bile, watching as it mixed with green oil to paint strange patterns on the ground. Suddenly, she realized the boy was standing next to her, looking down.
"Topic three," he said in a crisp, clear voice. "About the future. And so, I decided to end this world. There is no further need for people or machines, and I don't need a world I cannot understand. As this world was a failure, there is no reason for me to continue existing either."
Three of the Kainé automatons were approaching her. As she somehow dragged herself to her feet, they opened their mouths and let loose a horrifying cacophony of sound. She couldn't just let it end like this. She had to get in at least one more hit on the boy.
She swung her sword at the three automatons, but they danced out of the way and blasted her with the water again. Unable to dodge in time, the jets scourged her, nearly tearing her left arm from its socket. But then...
"Haaaah!"
After the scream, a strangely nonchalant voice called out—a voice she somehow knew:
"Hi, Kainé! Are you all right?"
"E...Emil?"
As Kainé struggled to refocus her damage-blurred vision, she was startled by the sight of a round, unnaturally large face hovering above her. Those two holes... were those eyes? Or...
What the... Oh right. Emil. This is Emil.
But it was not the Emil Kainé had once known. That Emil had seemed more... normal. She didn't remember him having four arms, for one thing. As she pondered this, magic seals appeared from Emil's four hands, and magic fists burst out to grab the three incoming automatons.
"Oh, these?" said Emil as he noticed her staring. "Yeah, I had to make a new body for myself, and it didn't go so well. Like, I ended up with too many arms! But then I thought, Well, it's better to have too many arms than not enough arms, right? Anyway, what have you been up to, Kainé?"
"Fighting," she answered, the dumbfounded expression still clear on her face.
"Oh right! Well then, lemme help you! Yaaaah!"
Emil grunted as his magical hands crushed the captive automatons, causing green oil and strange noises to emerge from between the black fingers. It was all incredibly sudden, and Kainé's muddled brain was struggling to understand what it meant for this floating, four-armed blob to be here. Annoyed, she tugged at her memory, trying to remember all she could about Emil, but her exhausted mind had only more questions. What had happened to him? Where had he been all this time? And what the hell was he doing here?
But one thing was certain. One fact irrefutable. Emil had been her comrade in arms, which meant nothing else mattered.
Suddenly, something fell on Emil's head with a loud bang—a torso that had been torn from one of the automatons. He shrieked and rolled into a ball as it slid off and landed on the ground below, splitting in two on impact before its components were absorbed into the mechanical surface. From the spot where it had been, a new Kainé automaton emerged. The creature rose to its feet and shook oil off its blades, causing familiar serrations to emerge.
"Kainé!" yelled Emil. "If we try to fight these guys, they're just gonna keep coming!"
"So what's your plan?" Kainé asked.
"There's a massive amount of magical energy at the heart of that giant tree there! I think that's what's powering them!"
As he spoke, one of Emil's magic hands tossed aside the crushed automaton it held and pointed at the tree, where a large hollow had formed among the roots. "Let's smash the shit out of that thing!" he yelled exuberantly.
Kainé smiled. Smashing its shit sounded pretty nasty, but... eh, whatever. She'd smash it all right. It was, after all, the only thing she was capable of.
The cables surrounding the path to the tree came to life, forming themselves into what appeared to be cocoons. The vague blobby shapes gradually took human form, new automatons wriggling inside a thin white skin. The moment Kainé saw them, she broke into a run. She needed to destroy that tree—she had to.
As she ran, she swung her blades at any automatons within reach while Emil shielded her from the water jets. "Are you okay?" he yelled. "I'm trying to—"
A group of at least ten automatons suddenly hurled themselves at Emil with the force of a thrown spear. Before his screams were swallowed by the pile of bodies, Kainé swung her sword hard enough to send the pile—Emil and all—flying. With a deft roll, Emil managed to right himself in midair.
"That was a little rough, Kainé!" he yelled.
"Yeah, but I got you there," she replied.
As Emil looked up to discover he was nearly at the roots of the great tree, the laughter of the boy rang out from above them. His grinning torso stuck out from a higher point on the trunk, looking legitimately delighted.
"Wonderful!" he yelled. "Incredible stuff! Now keep at it! I want to see what you Replicants are truly capable of!"
Kainé leaped at the trunk with a growl. It was so huge she didn't know how to attack it, so she began striking at the hollow in its roots. That part, however, seemed to be made of much stronger stuff than the rest of the tree; her attacks didn't damage it at all.
"Get back!" yelled Emil. Unfortunately, the voice hit her ears a second after a sudden explosion sent her flying.
"You could have killed me, you idiot!" she snarled.
"Nothing can kill you, Kainé!" Emil responded cheerfully. He then set off a continuous series of explosions, each one gouging out a huge chunk of root, while Kainé busied herself cutting down incoming automatons. When he called her name again, she turned to see a large magic barrier floating near the center of the roots.
"My magic can't seem to destroy that," Emil said, "so I'll destroy these Kainés and let you take care of it instead, okay?"
Before he could finish, Kainé had plunged her sword into the magic barrier. There was an intense flash, and the strange symbols that appear during magical spellcasting went flying through the air.
"That's it!" shouted the boy excitedly. "That's where our core frame is located! Isn't it incredible? All the world's information gets turned into light and passes through there. Maso and information fuse into one like a giant river!" He was grinning widely, as if their actions didn't matter to him at all. Kainé withdrew her sword and started battering away at the roots, while Emil drew close to protect her, still blasting the automatons.
"Kainé!" shouted Emil again. The shape of the earth's surface around them had begun to warp, and a close look at the tree revealed it was also changing. The cables that had neatly surrounded it were beginning to come apart, the undone plants and wires squirming and swaying as if they had minds of their own. The trees, the surface, and the outlines of the automatons grew hazy and muddled, the boundary between them beginning to blur. Then the forest melted away as if it were dissolving into an ocean.
"What you see now is the true nature of this world," the boy cried. "Machines and people and plants are combining into new forms due to the power of magic. It's incredible, absolutely incredible, that a Replicant could reach this layer!"
Kainé continued on to what appeared to be the center of the machine. The air there was steeped in the source of magical energy: Maso. As Emil fought frantically to protect her from an endless cascade of falling giant cables, the great tree and the wires that formed the ground around it began transforming into a bowl shape. After a time, the outer periphery of the bowl began to undergo a strange transformation, becoming thin, with gentle curves. It was as if the entire forest was transforming into some vast, abstract pattern.
Copious amounts of magical energy spread out around Kainé. Torrents of words, iron, and plants poured out in a flood from the air around them.
"Is this..." began the boy. "Is the barrier between magic and reality... disappearing?"
The moment he muttered the words, he was crushed by a massive, writhing set of cables. Emil yelled something as he frantically attempted to blast them, but the sound never reached Kainé's ears. Wrapped in a brilliant white light, she continued to single-mindedly swing her sword. She would destroy this place, and then... and then...
And then what?
All sound disappeared.
Emil and Kainé found themselves at a kind of border between fantasy and reality. She sensed something beyond that barrier—something very special. Light filled her thoughts.
She reached into the heart of the light, feeling something at her fingertips. She couldn't tell what they were brushing against, only that it was warm and alive—a person. She could tell that much, but otherwise the form was too indistinct to grab hold of.
The presence slipped from her touch, so Kainé pushed farther into the light in pursuit. As she did, she heard a voice:
"...iné... ...Don't..."
She felt tears against her cheeks.
"...go back... Don't..."
It was a voice she hadn't heard in a long time, and as it spoke, his presence began to take shape. Hand trembling, Kainé reached even farther in.
"...Stop..."
She couldn't reach it. It was going to disappear again.
Shut up, shut up, shut uuup!
I'm the one who decides how I live my life!
Nobody tells me what to do! I swore I would be a sword! I swore I would be YOUR sword!
Frightened tears burst from her eyes at the thought of losing him again. But she was also angry, and she howled at her weakness for not being able to reclaim him.
"I'm going to get you back," she cried, "and I don't care what it takes!"
Just then, Kainé felt a gentle push behind her shoulders—the smallest, kindest of pressures. She used its power to propel herself forward, screaming all the while.
"Who the FUCK do you think you are to just up and disappear like that, huh? I'M the one who gets to decide what my life means to me! It's MY life, and I'll do whatever I want with it!
"So
.
.
.
The light began to clear.
She could see the sky above, wide and blue.
The Forest of Myth had disappeared without a trace. The plants and machines that it had swept into spirals now formed gentle curves of thin planes. Layers of these planes overlapped one another, coming together to form a single large surface with oil flowing off the edges in an endless waterfall.
At the center of what had once been the forest was a smooth indentation. From it, a verdant green spire rose into the sky. Viewed from afar, it formed the stalk of a giant flower—and at the center of its petals was a pistil. This single, massive flower strongly resembled the kind referred to as a "Lunar Tear."
At the very top of the stamen spire, Kainé was embracing someone very dear to her. His face was deeply familiar, yet somehow also evocative of a distant past. As she watched his gentle breathing, Emil floated over to her.
Kainé raised her eyes. Back when she was in the light and someone pushed her, she was certain she'd heard a voice say: Take care of him for me, hussy.
She would get to see them again.
But things would be a little different. Emil's body had changed slightly, while Kainé had grown older. And as for him, he had reverted to his younger self again.
Yes. And his name was...
References[]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Grimoire NieR: Revised Edition p.287