I stood on trembling legs.
My entire body ached in ways that I never even thought possible.
But somehow, I spoke with conviction strong enough to ignite a passion in my chest. It burned hotter than both my fear and my cowardice.
In a world being drowned in a dampening grey light, the only color that fought against the grey was the scarlet of the Empress's flowing hair. At this point, I'm starting to believe in that bright scarlet even more than the gods themselves.
"Good. I like that expression on your face far more than the one you had previously.
Cacophony spoke under me.
She was still seated in the dirt, one hand braced on her knee, the other clutched tightly over the gash in her side. Blood had soaked into the fabric of her skirt and trickled down her leg in lazy rivulets. Her skin was pallid, damp with sweat, but her posture remained royal.
As much as I appreciated her unwavering nature, it was clear that something was deeply wrong.
As a vampire, Cacophony has proven a multitude of times that her physical body was far stronger than my own. She should be able to endure the soul-eating onslaught that the ghost is raining down to some degree.
And yet, she's fairing even worse than I am.
Her eyelids hung half open, her every movement was sluggish, and her breathing was labored.
"You're barely conscious..." I muttered.
"Withdraw your worry. I've been through far worse than this."
I wasn't sure if that made me feel better or worse.
"What about that spell that you used earlier? Don't you have any other healing spells that you could use to patch yourself up?"
"That... wasn't a healing spell. It's only a spell that transfers blood between two people. In a society of vampires, it has its uses, but transfusing blood is all that it can do. And, I don't have any healing spells that I could use."
Her answer was disappointing, but there was little that I could do.
The orb still pulsed in my palm, colors twisting in slow, infinite rhythm. My fingers had curled around it without meaning to.
That swirling rhythm and unending pattern of color.
It was the same as the eye peering down on us, both in how they looked and in their undead origins.
Their connection was undeniable.
My gaze drifted toward the house behind us. It was plain, quiet, and unbothered. A square of normalcy in a world unraveling at the seams. The swords in the yard hadn't moved. The eye hadn't fired its beam and struck everything out of existence.
Yet...
Normally, that would mean that we have time, but this situation had quickly become more dire.
In a short time, our souls would be devoured by this monstrosity.
I closed my eyes and allowed myself to think.
'Defeating something as crazy as this...'
'Avenging all the people this thing killed...'
'Spectors coming from lingering regrets that leak out at the moment of death...'
'The soul is the source of all power...'
'Ghosts are spiritual beings. They're made up entirely of spiritual energy...'
'Cacophony's weakened state... The eye's blinding light...'
I began to grimace.
'That's not it... That can't be it... Keep going and find it... The final piece to the puzzle that'll make this all work... Even if everything is completely hopeless, as long as she doesn't give up... I have to keep going.'
I opened my eyes again, gaze drawn toward the seated Empress. Her hair clung to her cheek, soaked in sweat and blood, and yet her expression remained unchanged.
If not for the tattered state of her body, I may have fallen to my knees from her overwhelming beauty.
"…Hey," I said, slowly. "Why are you so weak right now?"
Her crimson eyes met mine. She didn't blink.
I took a breath. "Is it because of that light? The beam the eye fired at you—did it do something to your soul?"
Cacophony gave me a slow and deliberate nod of her head.
"Yes. I suspect the beam targeted my soul directly. Normally, if I were to be struck by such an attack, it would be repelled or resisted without even a second thought… but I am not at full power."
Her voice was calm, but there was a thinness to it now.
"I was already weakened before we arrived here. Decades of being trapped in that coffin have proven to be detrimental to both my physical body and my soul. I'm weaker than I was before being sealed, and my energy reserves are far lower. To top it all off, my output and control are waning as well. The coffin you found me in had become my tomb in more ways than one."
Her hand fell from her side and rested limply against the grass.
"My spiritual energy is running low," she added, quieter now. "Critically low."
That last part hit harder than I expected. I'd thought of her as nearly invincible. A monster in all the ways I wasn't. And now?
She was breaking down faster than I was.
I shook my head, trying to clear the static that buzzed in my brain.
"While I could dive into the sea of knowledge that I've gained from travelling the multiverse, I'd rather hear this from your lips... What'll happen if your spiritual energy runs dry?"
She didn't miss a beat.
"I'll die." She said flatly.
My fingers tightened around the orb.
I'd already figured as much, but I needed to hear it to understand the true weight of it.
I stared up again at the unmoving eye, burning against the grey sky like a dead sun.
Cacophony said ghosts were spiritual beings—beings made entirely of soul energy. That meant…
"Cacophony," I said, slowly. "Would it be possible…"
She turned to me again.
"…for us to attack its soul directly?"
Cacophony blinked once. Her gaze didn't waver.
"…I was thinking of doing something along those lines," she admitted. "But it won't be easy."
Of course it wouldn't be.
She shifted slightly, her hand pressing harder into her wound as if the pain might be coaxed into staying still. Her back was straight, but even I could see how much effort it took her to hold that posture.
"To destroy a ghost, there are two options. First is to do enough damage to its body that it can no longer reform itself... That option only works for weaker ghosts, so that's out of the question. For a ghost as powerful as this, you must target the core of its soul—the origin of its regrets. That core would be hidden deep within its body."
I tilted my head. "Then… we just need to find its body. Right? But, aren't we already in its stomach? Isn't that enough?"
Cacophony turned her head toward me with a faint grimace, the kind of look you'd give someone who just asked if you could microwave metal.
"No," she said. "It doesn't work that way."
I frowned. "But… you said this place is like its stomach. It's digestive system. If we're in it—if we're being digested—then isn't this place part of its body?"
"You've got a tiny misunderstanding. This place is not a part of the ghost's main body. It is not composed of its spiritual energy."
She reached her hand out and brushed her fingertips against the grass.
"The street we're on is real. The houses are real. The fences, the sidewalks, the mailboxes—they all come from the real world."
She had a good point. I hadn't considered that fact.
As I mulled it over in my mind, my confusion deepened.
"Then how is the ghost doing this? How can it trap us here, loop the street, eat our souls—if it's not even making the place itself? That's without mentioning the way the street was warping a little while ago."
Cacophony took a breath before speaking.
"This ghost doesn't create matter, but a powerful ghost would be capable of haunting objects or locations. A parasitic kind of possession. That's all this is. Since it's haunting the street, it reacts whenever the ghost suffers some kind of shock or attack. In this case, that would be our crude attempt at escaping."
"So," I said, slowly, "if this street is just a haunted shell… and the ghost's actual body has to be something made of spiritual energy…"
"It has to be close," Cacophony said. "The ghost, and by extension the core, can't be far from where its influence is strongest. Somewhere nearby, something must exist that didn't originate from the world we know. That's where its real body will be."
I looked around again, more carefully this time.
All of it—each mailbox, each crooked light pole—was just set dressing. Borrowed from reality. Dragged into this nightmare.
"Where could it hide itself? Its body and core must be somewhere here with us..."
I could rule out anywhere that had been erased by the eye's blinding light. After all, that would've been ghost suicide... A suicide from beyond the grave. What a strange idea.
Well, since the ghost was so trigger-happy when it came to erasing the street, it wasn't worried about destroying its core by accident.
The only place that the ghost hesitated to destroy was this house and its backyard.
My eyes drifted toward the yard again, toward the lawn cluttered with swords stabbed haphazardly into the ground like a hundred silent witnesses. In the center of the plastic warzone was a modest lawn chair.
It was a strange sight to be sure, even stranger now that it was directly in front of my eyes.
But... is that really it? This place doesn't feel all that magical... Plus, we've just established that this street is real and not something created by the ghost.
If this place is where the core is hiding, then doesn't that mean that some of the street is real and some of it is fake? And it was all edited together so that no one would notice?
That feels wrong. For that to be the answer, this situation would get way too convoluted... And I'm struggling to keep up with all the magical stuff already. My brain is on the verge of bursting.
Let's think this through in simple terms. Just lay the facts out.
First, the other houses on the street were warped due to the ghost being agitated after our escape attempt.
Second, this house was unaffected by the warping.
Third, the ghost refuses to attack this house directly.
When I put it that way, it's easy to put together.
"For some reason, this house is outside of the ghost's control, and for the same unknown reason, the ghost can't attack it."
That was useful knowledge, but it also set me back.
It allowed me to rule the house out as an option for where the core is hiding, but that leaves me without any leads.
I need to keep thinking.
***
In math, certain information is given to you as 'given'.
Such information can be considered iron-clad as the truth, and while it could be scrutinized, it couldn't be truly questioned in terms of its validity. You build off those truths and form conclusions from them. That's the nature of logic. That's the world I came from.
But the Null Streets weren't built on such straightforward logic.
The rules here were intentionally hidden and muddled.
I felt as though this place was never intended to be understood by anyone other than its creator.
That meant that everything—all that existed within this space—needed to be viewed through a lens. Nothing could be assumed until it was proven.
Right now, there is a contradiction hiding within all the information that I've been taking for granted.
It's hiding right in front of my face. The key to finding the location of the ghost's true body and escaping from this place.
'Come on... Come on...'
My thoughts raced, sliding around in the back of my mind like loose marbles on a ship's deck. The orb in my hand pulsed again, and I felt the tug of its rhythm urging me.
I tilted my head up and stared at the sky again.
As expected, the monolithic pupil engulfing the sky was staring down at us with a searing hatred. It bled vile light and released a sickening pressure onto the world.
It was a sight so unnatural that it forced the mind to wander back to when the sky was normal and think about what the sky was meant to look like.
My mind rewound, grasping at a memory from before all this began. The night sky before we were pulled into this cursed place.
And suddenly, I remembered.
"…The moon," I said aloud, more to myself than anyone else.
Cacophony turned her head slightly, her expression curious. "What?"
I pointed up, narrowing my eyes against the oppressive light.
"The moon. Before we got trapped in this place, I looked up at the sky. It was a crescent."
Even saying it aloud made something settle into place.
Cacophony's eyes followed mine, narrowing as she studied the glowing orb in the sky. Not the swirling one in my hand, but the vast, unmoving eye that had watched us since we entered this realm. Pale and radiant, like a cruel imitation of the real moon.
"That's when it changed," I said, my voice growing more confident. "Right after we got pulled into this subspace. The crescent became a full moon. But now… It's not even a moon anymore. It's part of the eye, right where the center of its pupil should be."
The Empress didn't speak for several seconds. When she did, it was with a tone that suggested the answer had been obvious all along.
"…Then the answer is simple."
She met my gaze, and for a moment her regal demeanor returned, steady and unshaken.
"The ghost's true body—and by extension, the core of its being—is hiding within that eye."