[5-10] Flights of Fancy (Christa and Red)

[Kenpachi Zaraki]

Nanaki clenched his jaw tightly, gritting his teeth as sharp, visceral pain tore at his gut. His sole working eye slammed shut as his organs writhed in his gut, his body tensing in retaliation against the torment. He endured the pain without making a peep, his senses dampened for a few seconds before the agony began to subside. In its stead, Red felt blood pool in his stomach as nausea washed over him. He could barely ponder what was happening before he began retching, sticky ichor surging upward and freeing itself from his esophagus as a tabby might hack a hairball onto the family sofa.

At his side, the feline heard Christa say something, though he couldn’t hear it. She had stumbled just as the pain overtook him, the dribble of blood streaming from her mouth telling Red that he was not alone in his pain. He blinked hard, waiting for the pain’s return, though it never came. “You...you too?”

The sniper brought her hand to her mouth, coughing up a fine mist of crimson droplets into her palm. “Yeah, me too.”

The fiery feline shook his head, spitting thick gobs of bloody saliva onto the forest floor. Was this affliction perhaps a consequence of their battle with the magma golem, some macabre curse placed upon them in its dying moments? Nanaki thought back, remembering that neither had consumed anything rancid since arriving on the island; there was the food on the plane, though. Had they been poisoned before even arriving? The crimson Prime silently cursed the Syntech employee’s meatloaf as his paranoid brain searched for answers.

“Was someone sick on the plane?” Christa asked, wiping bloody spit with the back of her hand. She retrieved a fresh cigarette from her carton, replacing the one that now lay mooshy and bloodsoaked amid the muck. 

“I don’t think anything from a few hours ago would incubate so quickly. Or, at least I hope not.” Nanaki did remember a particularly foul-smelling participant aboard the plane, though he never got near enough to the walking horror to become infected. Luckily, his superhumanly acute olfaction had caught the scent of the molecules at a range well beyond what any pathogen could reach. Though, there was the possibility that Karl or Christa could have passed it to him. Having discounted the idea, he shook the thought from his head.

“Let’s hope,” she replied, nodding. Elsewhere in the Omniverse, this might be something to spur one to head back to their warm beds and sleep it off. This, however, was the Danteverse. They could not afford to simply sit on their hands (or paws) and hope for the best. “This way,” Christa replied, gesturing in the direction of the blinking indicator. 

Red followed in her wake wordlessly, now paying special attention to his surroundings. He had encountered enough outlandish baddies to be paranoid of unseen sorcerers or poisonous swarms just beyond the mist. The feline put his nose to its job, whilst at the same time focusing his ears on anything that might be out-of-place. He only hoped his senses could provide answers to any of the myriad of questions that the island continued to pose.

---

The pair of predators continued their prowl, slowly plodding through the wilderness toward the strobing indicator on the strange widget. Christa kept her rifle at the ready as they moved, occasionally spinning to point the barrel now and again at the odd sound or movement, usually some variety of wildlife being the culprit. The mist thickened as they progressed, the fine droplets eventually drenching the duo as the biome transitioned into something more akin to a tropical rain forest. Red was forced to stop more than once, shaking the moisture from his thick, heavy fur. Karl’s gift had miraculously not malfunctioned in the overly moist environment, the chirps now chiming closer and closer together. 

“Damn trees...” Christa grumbled, lifting herself over a downed log. Her feet lost traction as they met the slippery ground, nearly toppling the blonde before she could catch her balance. She cursed under her breath, glaring at the log as if it could understand.

Nanaki remained silent, lost in his thoughts as he struggled to gather any scrap of information from his sensory organs. It seemed that the harder he tried to sense into the distance, the more ‘resistance’ he seemed to get. The few times he was able to reach beyond the ‘wall’, he couldn’t make sense of what he had felt. Despite not knowing how to qualify the information, he felt…unnerved. Something about what he detected shook him, though he was at a loss to describe it. Something felt wrong.

“Let’s take a short break here,” the blonde gunslinger said, stopping suddenly. Red, oblivious to anything but his sensory duties, nearly toppled the woman into the drink before he realized what was said. 

The two took a seat at the edge of a moderately-sized river, the water surprisingly clear for such a well-hidden source. The far bank was a mere few meters away, the water contained within being no more than a foot deep itself. Red breathed heavily as he sat beside the water, having not realized how fatigued he was until he stopped to rest. The grip of lethargy wormed its way up his limbs and wrapped around his neck as he panted like an exhausted pup. After a moment the crimson prime lowered his nose to the water’s surface, sniffing it cautiously. Though not exactly pristine, the water seemed to be clean enough to at least be potable. With a small shrug, he began lapping up the crystal liquid, the cool water beginning to alleviate a portion of his malaise. 

Christa eyed the water suspiciously, wiping a bead of sweat from her brow. “Are you sure that’s safe?” Before the fiery feline could raise his head to respond, the blonde snapped to attention. “Did you hear that?”

2195 words for both posts.