The Baddest

Ru's body shuddered, a silent scream escaping his lips. Tears streamed down his face. In his sleep, he was reliving the nightmare, reliving the horror of being trapped, helpless.

"I will kill you all, all of you!" he cried, his voice hoarse and raspy. "I will show no mercy to any of you!"

The mysterious and deep-voiced woman was talking to someone. "Tell me, do you like what you did?" she demanded.

The man hesitated, "Well, a little."

"So stop tampering with the phone and convince him he's safe," the woman said, her tone stern.

"Who made you queen of the universe?" the man retorted a hint of defiance in his voice.

"If you took what I said as an order, that's your problem," " the woman replied, her voice icy.

"You should see her, Lirui. She looks like a scarecrow with a wig," the man mockingly said.

"Said the Wizard of Oz," the woman retorted, her tone unchanged.

"You heartless," the man hissed, his voice filled with venom.

The faint echoes of their conversation filtered into Ru's consciousness, a jumble of words and accusations. He tried to move, but his body was heavy and unresponsive. As his curiosity forced him, his eyelids fluttered open. The dim light cast strange shadows on the faces around him, their eyes glowing like twin embers in the darkness. They were like Alter Ru in Ru's perception—shadowy beings.

"You're not naked as you think," the man said, his voice a soothing balm in the chaos of Ru's mind. "You're not tied up, and no one has given you an injection. They took blood from you for a sample, that's all."

Ru's eyes widened in disbelief. He tried to sit up, but his body refused to cooperate. The man's hand, warm and comforting, rested on his shoulder.

"Now relax and go back to sleep," the man said, his voice gentle. As he spoke, Ru felt a wave of calm wash over him, the tension in his body melting away. His eyelids grew heavy, and he drifted back into the darkness, the nightmare fading into a distant memory.

Friction noises returned. Some were big, some small. Some stopped quickly, others lasted a long time. Something was slipping, sliding, and smelling like blood, oil, or paint thinner. The floor was hard, loose, or sometimes like a drum or a soft bed. The rubbing object turned, curled, went straight, and came back. What it did was like drawing or painting.

Was someone painting?

"I'm going to kill you, painter," Ru said in a stronger voice, referring to the finger that hovered over his lips.

'Kill for art?'

The last sentence caused great confusion in Ru's mind. His brain shut down his consciousness and completely paralyzed his body. It was as if Ru had left his body and ascended. Yes, what he was experiencing was astral travel.

He rose higher and higher. He passed through the ceiling and traveled through all the floors of the building he was in. As he continued his rapid descent into the night sky, he had a bird's eye view of the city where he lived. When he looked up, he saw that he was rising into a two-dimensional space. In that space, some celestial bodies were nothing more than children's doodles. One of them was very dark. Ru could not stop looking at it. It was a colossal cloud surrounded by pitch-blackness, growing larger and larger. In the middle of it was an eye that opened and closed, a gray eye... It looked at Ru, pulled Ru towards it, and swallowed Ru.

At the point where he said, "I am dead," he opened his eyes again. He was in a gray darkness. He or she was sitting on a stone pedestal in that stormy darkness where the ashes were falling.

The pedestal rose from the endless abyss, a solitary island in a dark sea. A figure sat upon it, shrouded in an aura of ethereal beauty. Her long hair cascaded down, nearly touching the cold stone floor. She was a lotus flower, her posture serene yet filled with a quiet intensity. She had her knees pulled up to her body. Her elbows rested on her knees, her hands cradling her head as she lost herself in thought. She was motionless, but a faint pulse of life from her; unlike the giant statues surrounding her. The statues were gorgeous, frozen in time, their final expressions etched upon their faces like masks. But they lacked the spark of life, the soul that animated them.

And she, the girl in the middle of it all was alive. She shook off the ashes that had fallen like snow with a quick shake of her head. But she was still withdrawn. Her eyes, burning with purple flames, were half open. She was pensive, staring into the abyss below.

She whispered with a voice full of longing: "Where are you, Seneca?"

While his heart is beating like "I'm here," Ru could not place himself anywhere in this dream. It was as if he and the girl were intertwined. But her existence alone was dominant enough to erase his.

"Oh, I'm so bored," she said as she shifted her sitting position and put her feet in the space. "I wish you would have opened the door before you left. I wish you hadn't left me on my own. What am I, a warden?"

The girl had a childish voice, almost like a meow.

Childish voice, meowing, 777 calls at a time.

"Who are you?" Ru wanted to ask, but he couldn't make himself exist. It was as if he was just an eye. The gigantic eye was as big as a mountain compared to her.

With this vague awareness, Ru felt himself rising. It was as if he was looking at the girl and the statues in a snow globe. If he had a hand, he could have picked up the orb, turned it upside down, and started the ash rain again. But he didn't, Ru couldn't find himself.

The girl was silent.

The girl became a point as Ru continued to rise and grow. The orb turned into water and poured over Ru's head.