XCEL

The Senketsu High rooftop was somehow even more barren and grey than the rest of the school—Rinkaku Harigane wondered whether they considered that some kind of achievement.

Occasionally, on rooftops like these, tucked away amid all the railings, lightning rods and air vents, you might find some small planters and beds of soil: an opportunity for those inclined to practice and develop their gardening skills. The rooftop was often a place for students to socialise, a place to eat lunch that wasn’t their classroom, and away from the crowds. A place of calm, a place of quiet.

Students weren’t allowed on the rooftop of Senketsu High. The previous year, a boy at his wit’s end had pitched himself from the ledge, and hadn’t survived. That day Rin had lost all respect for the institution and others like it. The two had never been friends—entirely Rin’s fault, he’d just never been interested in that kind of thing—but Mizuki had a creative soul: witty and bright, but not academic. Over time, he’d been driven so deep into the ground by the pressure of conformity from above, he was utterly lost amid despair. The funeral had simmered with outrage from all in attendance, bubbling beneath a thick skin of mourning. His parents had sued the school for negligence, and rightly so. As a feeble way of saving face, the faculty had bolted the door shut, and padlocked it thus. That was the only thing that had changed. Talk of the incident had been declared taboo.

Rin, however, treated such restrictions as gentle suggestions, to be acknowledged and swiftly cast aside. He wasn’t about to kill himself, far from it, but sympathised with Mizuki and his choice. He only wished his talents would be valued better in his next life.

Slipping a thin set of wires from his pocket, Rin picked the lock and slid rusted bolts aside, only to be sucker-punched by a bluster of November chill. The breeze slammed the door behind him with a clang that made him freeze, but no-one cared enough to follow. He traipsed over to a coughing vent that would reasonably substitute as a bench. The breeze had subsided, but every inhale coated his trachea with a hint of frost, and every exhale left a misty trail that dissipated up to join the light grey stratus blanketing the sky. He didn’t properly sit but perched on his ankles like a magpie guarding its hoard of treasure. His encroaching hunger took priority, and so he plucked cold sushi from his plastic bento at rapid pace, barely even bothering to chew.

An opportunistic seagull, perched on a nearby railing in a strikingly similar fashion, gave Rin a very odd look and squawked. The boy nearly toppled backwards off the vent.

“Go away, will you?”

It rustled its wings, staring at his sushi. Rin beamed a cucumber roll right between its eyes. The gull gave a shrill, cut-off yelp and tumble backwards off the railing.

“Stupid bird,” Rin cursed under his breath. He popped one more roll into his mouth for good measure and rummaged around in his satchel for the package.

Wielding his finger like a utility knife, he sliced open the box’s tape with his nail, and emptied the box beside him. Half a dozen packing peanuts littered the floor—he made a mental note to pick them up—before a hefty book and large knife, nearly the length of his forearm, clattered onto the metal. Rin’s eyes shot wide open. In reactionary paranoia, he buried the knife under the cardboard lest anyone else see. They hadn’t. He was alone.

This relic looked like it belonged behind glass, rather being mailed to a highschooler like some cheap trinket. The blade was unnaturally heavy, the type of heft steel alone could not bring. The scarab emblem on the hilt was a telling detail, and the guard extended on one sides in a curved wings. Rin considered himself an expert in many things—because of course he did—but bladesmithing was not one of them. The knife had been shattered widthwise, split in two. The blade was only tapered on one side. The edge undulated, snakelike, with such venom in its point that Rin feared getting cut simply from looking at it. The steel shone despite the lack of sun. Rin clutched this masterwork in awe. Looking into the metal, he spotted a perfect reflection. Odd. Normal knives weren’t such effective mirrors. Then again, his only point of comparison was the brushed stainless steel in kitchen knives.

The broken half of the blade was flat and dull: a clean, deliberate split. Certain grooves had been carved into this flat edge. Were they symbols?

A eerie foreboding—a primordial fear—seeped through the skin and into his blood, spreading like a curse from the point of contact, his right palm. Visceral shivers rippled across his skin. A pit sunk in his stomach. His possession of this just wasn't right, as though he had stolen it. But how could he have? This was all addressed to him in that package he received. Surely, he hadn’t done anything wrong. Unless, this wasn’t his doing, but rather…

Dad, what the hell did you do?

Rin wrapped it back up in the paper and lowered it back into the box, covering it with the scattered foam peanuts from earlier, making sure to leave no litter (He may be an ass, but he was no hypocrite). The moment he broke contact, the foreboding faded. Rin looked at his palm, and thought he saw a shadow of the blade’s hilt branded into the skin. It could have been just a trick of the light, however.

Seizing the book, Rin held it up to the light in scrutiny. A large, leather-bound notebook.

“The Tomb of Horus’ Banished Disciple…” Rin read off the title. “I fucking knew it.”

The scrawl on the inside cover faded through many years of wear, but below a statement of ownership was his father’s scratchy signature. He’d recognise that handwriting anywhere.

Rin idly traced the man’s signature with his finger. The ink had dried long ago. Leafing through the first few pages, Rin found nothing remarkable about it. The pages were yellow and had curled in a few places, the binding peeled slightly. Neither detail was noteworthy; the book was just old. He couldn’t be bothered to trail through his father’s research if you held him at gunpoint. Besides, lunch break would be over soon. He only had so much time.

The inscription on the inside cover caught his eye. His father’s handwriting was illegible at best, but if anyone was best suited for deciphering, it’d be his begrudging son. Rin sighed. A message was scrawled in large, faded grey characters.

rinkaku

153 to 160

use the ascension blade

I never wanted to involve you in this

they’re coming

forgive me

Rin squinted at the text, brow scrunched. What kind of game was he playing? What kind of cryptic instruction was this? His father had been in a rush at the time of writing this. After all, he hadn’t had the time to write out the kanji for his name, only katakana. There were many things Rin could forgive him for, but wouldn’t in a hurry. He unwrapped the strange knife for another look. Use the blade for what? As a weapon? On who? Rin hadn’t yet reached the end of his tether such that he’d start outright stabbing people, though—let’s be honest—it wouldn’t take much. Besides, the knife looked so fragile that Rin thought it might shatter on contact.

The longer he tried to make sense of it all, the less sense it made. There was a chance that this didn’t mean anything, that none of this meant anything. His father could’ve just sent him a meaningless novelty gift from one of his excavations. Like hell he cared about that! Rin had his own things to do. He wanted nothing to do with the dusty burial mounds and relics his father spent his days gawking over like how a magpie lusted after a wedding ring.

The two numbers couldn’t be anything other than page references. The notebook had its pages painstakingly numbered, after all. The tactile papers crinkled and folded under slender fingers. A spiteful voice—the kind Rin knew he let out of his mouth far too often—bounced around his head.

I may have wanted to hear from you once, old man, but that was a long time ago. You think this is going to change anything?

Reels of faded film flashed past his mind’s eye, and he winced. An empty seat at the dinner table; a woman’s face, kind with sunken cheeks, lapsed into disappointment; an office door remained locked. The only sign of life was a man behind a desk, scratching away.

If you’re trying to say anything, don’t bother. I might have listened once, but that Rin is long since buried. Whatever this is, it should have stayed that way too. Maybe you can dig up her memory, and apologise.

Soon, the seemingly endless flipping of pages concluded. For a moment, Rin stared at the page. Then, he turned the book on its side, squinted at it for a few seconds, before turning it upside down.

“What the hell am I reading?”

Rin was beset with page after page of nonsensical scribbles, a linguist’s fever dream on a lethal quantity of hallucinogen. Squinting at them again and turning the book upside down, Rin could vaguely make out similarities to Arabic. It sure as anything wasn’t hieroglyphics. If this was supposed to be understandable, then he was American.

This had to be some kind of joke.

“Screw you, old man.”

Rin unceremoniously cast the book down onto the bench. The leather hit the wooden surface with a dull thud, striking the handle and causing it to fly off the tabletop. He cursed, diving after it before it could skid too far out of his grasp. Frustration bit at the quick, bile frothing in his throat. Still, he couldn’t let himself be seen with this thing. The questions that arose, Rin had neither the time, energy, nor bother to have to answer. Retrieving the damaged implement, Rin couldn’t help but study it some more. He traced its fingers along the intricate grooves that ran the length of the hilt.

That was when he spotted the resemblance. The runes etched into the back of the blade were the same as in the book. Rin looked from one to the other and back again.

He’d been deluding himself for his own protection. This was clearly no joke. His father didn’t have the emotional capacity for jokes.

An interest in the illegible text suddenly re-ignited, Rin swept messy hair out of his eyes, balancing his chin in the crook of his palm. Using the tip of the knife like a stylus to help him read, he traced the tip along the runes. The mirrored edge of the blade was facing him as it happened and, as he did this more and more, Rin found himself gazing into the blade’s reflection at some perfectly legible print.

Sorry—what?

There was no mistaking it. In the blade’s reflection, he saw Japanese print laid out on the page. Looking back at the notebook, the runes were just as illegible as before. Rin’s gaze bounced unceasing between the blade’s shiny surface and the yellowed pages of book like a ping-pong ball. His head was starting to hurt—not, this time, on account of his chronic lack of sleep.

His eyes must have been playing tricks on him. Putting the blade down, Rin rubbed both eyes with balled fists. Hair flopped across his face like a curtain. Strange patterns danced across his darkened vision from the pressure on his retina. That hadn’t helped, only exacerbating the pain behind his eyes. Sleep deprivation hallucinations? More likely than you’d think. Rin wished they’d come another time.

Picking the knife back up, he held it sideways and read the runes in the strange mirror. His eyes tried to wander, but were kept in place by sheer willpower at this point. He had to make sense of it all, and didn’t have much time left.

—the Excel Ritual is performed by plunging the Ascension Blade deep within the brain. The sharp blade will penetrate the skull and harmlessly bypass the frontal lobes, just deep enough to activate the pineal grand. The soulmetal will resonate, forming a connection to the Eye. Momentarily elevated, the mind will undergo a trial. If it can withstand the bombardment of psychic energy, the disparate halves of the mind will be united, their flow restored. If not, the Eye will overwhelm the mind, and irrevocably corrupt the information of the soul. The body will mutate beyond all recognition. Those Rejected by the Eye cease to be. They become puppets, subservient to its will.

“Oh for crying out loud…”

Rin closed the book very gently, he laid the blade on top of it like a sacred treasure, remembering how he had sent it clattering to the ground not ten minutes ago. That line from his father’s warning smacked against his head, chiming bells of doom.

They’re coming.

Rinkaku Harigane held his head in his hands, and proceeded to set a new world record for fastest progression through the Kübler-Ross model of grief. His fists tightened in fistfuls of hair. “This has to be a joke. This can’t be real. Fuck!” He screamed up into the sky. Banging his fist against the vent, he wailed, “I’d pay literally anything. Please, oh god please.” His cries echoed into the sky, and he hung his head. “Oh, it’s so over. The industry is ruined.” Rin stayed that way for a good ten seconds. One single shaky breath later, he sat upright, wiped a hopeless tear from the corner of one eye. “Well, that just happened.”

The nervous sweat on Rin’s face grow cold. He shivered, and his watch ticked over the hour. Afternoon class had started ten minutes ago. He had to go. Nothing had ever been able to make his blood run cold like what he had read about in that notebook. Like most his age, Rin had desensitised himself to tonnes upon tonnes of senseless horror films for the sake of it, but this was something else. This was terror in its purest form: truly incomprehensible. It wasn’t just his mind that disagreed, but his entire body felt like rejecting what he had just learnt. It was foreign, alien. He shivered again.

He wasn’t supposed to know this.

His father wasn’t supposed to know this.

No-one was supposed to know this.

Dad, what have you done?

Rin hastily shoved everything back into his bag, legging it back down the stairs before he was able to scare himself anymore with its contents. For once, he was grateful for the monotony of class, hoping it would distract him from his own mind.

* * *

Beyond the school, the day continued like any other. Senketsu was situated on a fairly busy city street not too far away from Chiba’s central business district. The middle of the afternoon brought with it surprising foot traffic, at a time when you’d expect most to be holed up in their offices. Men, women and children—all engrossed in cultural solidarity—went about their lives in that same blissful ignorance. They had their problems: expectations of work, issues with family, the list went on. However, none were forced to live with the existential knowledge that the key to power beyond the facets of human comprehension lay in the hands of a seventeen-year-old boy.

If they did, and knew the resulting consequences, they would all stay far away.

No-one much looked to the skies anymore; a shame. Otherwise they might have spotted a tall shadow outlined against the pale winter sky. A man was seated precariously on the rounded edge of a rooftop, legs dangling over the edge with careless abandon. Clad in his signature black trench-coat and fedora, Hideyori Hakana couldn’t have looked any more out of place if he had tried. His grin cut through the tedium of the day like the knife he sought.

This strange man held a strange orb in one palm, resting on his knee. Sparse rays of sun, droplets of heaven, broke the oppressive cloud cover. They hit the orb’s unblemished, convex glassy surface and bounced within the depths, glinting. If one looked carefully enough within its misty depths, one could see a near-perfect replica of the surrounding landscape, progressing in real time. The city-born birds flew over the man’s head, and the pedestrians walked by below, completely unaware.

Everything that happened around Hakana also happened within his orb. The orb to a mirror to reality, the feed to a camera situated at a bird’s eye vantage: a perfect replica of the scene at hand. It captured a moment in time, a peaceful moment. One of the last for a long while, he thought. Raising the orb up to his eye level, Hakana nodded.

“I’ve seen enough; I’m satisfied.”

His tone was low, calm; the rasp of a smoker, a Kansai twang. He flourished his wrist, and the orb vanished into thin air. This performance was more than mere sleight of hand. The man stood, crossed his arms and surveyed the street below one last time. The wind seized his coattails, and they flapped out by his side.

“Time to test out the new merchandise.”

An actor performing to a rapturous applause, he threw his right arm out to his side, fingers splayed. In between his fingers appeared three more orbs. These were smaller. Where had they come from? The steady thrum of energy that flowed from man’s third eye might just give a clue. His hair flowed with the wind like his coat, lifting off his face to reveal a dark patch over his right eye, leaving only two of his eyes visible: the one where an eye should be, and the other, where an eye definitely should not.

He tossed the orbs a foot up into the air, watching their ascent with fascination. Catching them, he pelted them out across the street. The orbs sailed over the heads of passers-by. They didn’t shatter on impact, but bounced once or twice before rolling to a halt. The clinks of glass attracted the attention of a few nearby. By the time their searching gazes swept by the rooftops, Hakana had disappeared. The orbs weren’t discarded, however. Each flashed with blinding light, before bursting open in a shattered glass symphony. Released from containment at last, six cyclopean gargantua suddenly made themselves known.

The most painful part, was that they had once been human. The smallest among them was over two metres tall. Any expression of gender became null and void. Copious muscle bulged from every part of their bodies. Spiderwebs of blood vessels throbbed, thick like hosepipes. The skin was stretched so taut it split in places. Pus and viscera leaked from wounds of strain. Identical black jumpsuits had been stretched and torn around the grossly magnified bodies, exposing bare skin around the arms, chest and thighs. Compare the muscle mass of these creatures to the elite bodybuilders was like comparing the size of an ant to an elephant. A comparison so nonexistent, it was downright unfair.

The next was their eye. There was only one.

Placed square in the centre of the face, the optic nerve had taken root in the skull like parasite fungus, tendrils spreading across the face. The eye grew so vast it split the face itself clean open, exposing layers of raw, red muscle, and pushing all other parts of the face aside to make room. The eye was the face's sole feature. The rest was barely visible, crumpled up against the ears on either side along with layers of torn, bleeding skin. The eye was wide, staring and bulbous, the pupil flexing with the to-and-fro movement of industrial-sized sinews. They bulged out of the skull as though threatened to pop off with a sickening squelch and give birth to an entirely new creature altogether.

Shocked silence was followed by the most guttural, horrific screams.

The creatures all stumbled about blind like infant demons, letting out visceral roars that shook the ground—a unholy combination of high tones, low tones, and everything else in between. The anguished cries of the damned rung from within one horribly mutated prison of flesh. Bystanders recoiled and yelled in surprise, followed by disgust, then terror. Any and all prior intention was abandoned immediately as primordial fear took root in their hearts. Some bolted immediately. Others weren’t so lucky, and could only stand there, cemented in place, their faces and bodies paralysed in abject horror.

These rejected creations, abominations never supposed to see the light of day, attacked with no rhyme, reason, or mercy for the living. One man only had time to open his mouth before one of the horrifying creatures let loose a blow that caved his chest inwards. Another wasn’t quick enough to evade, let alone escape. Seized by a large fist, the man’s face was slammed like a ragdoll into the tarmac, leaving behind a small crater. His skull crushed like a cantaloupe, blood and grey matter painting the pavement.

Many more unfortunate victims followed but soon, all was still. Traffic had ceased. The cars closest to the epicentre had been smashed to smithereens in the initial rampage. Anyone with sense had abandoned their vehicles once the carnage began. Police sirens wailed their haunting song in the distance.

All six of the Rejected turned in eerie unison towards the school gate. A beacon of power lay ahead of them, a pulsing psychic presence resonated with each of the eyes. That was where they were headed, following a single track towards their target, no matter who might get in their way.

The voice of the Queen spoke in their heads, compelling them onwards. They had no choice but to listen to her. They would do as she said. The tortured screaming of their mangled souls would not stop, nor would their march, until they had laid their hands on that blade, and met their end.

* * *

Far enough away for his pleas to fall on the deaf walls of stone, Katsuro's bloodied face fell limp against his broken shoulder. Gus had gotten his way in the end. It was only a matter of time. They had him taken away from that prison cell in Cairo, and back to Japan. His chest heaved up and down without reprieve. A hoarse sound brushed past his vocal cords, irreparably damaged long ago from his tortured yells. He could only make one sound, and he knew it wouldn’t reach. He knew he didn’t have long.

“Rinkaku,” he wheezed. “I’m sorry…”