Escape From Otherworld (a/k/a The Borderlands)
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Escaping the Past
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Escaping the Past
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LuzHela’s mocking demeanor softened a fraction. She looked from Helena’s devastated face to Geto’s unconscious form. This Helena still looked very much like the her Helena. This strange look on Helena’s face subtly pained her.
She knelt, her movements now devoid of theatrics. “His soul is a mess,” she stated clinically, hovering a hand over Geto’s chest. “Fractured. Full of holes where his Curses used to be. And clinging to him… your energy, Helena. A seraph’s grief. And one of your friends, Gojo, was it?… ah, a god’s guilt. A potent cocktail. It didn’t just move you through space. It moved you through states.” She looked around. “This place… it exists between certainties. A nexus of ‘what if.'”
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Helena’s tears fell freely now. “What does that mean?”
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LuzHela met her gaze, her golden eyes gleaming with a terrifying, ancient knowledge. “It means, my dear, distressed damsel, that the universe—in its infinite chaos—has just dumped a problem on my lap.” A slow, sharp-toothed smile spread across her face. “And I find myself… intrigued.”
She looked at Suguru Geto, the man who had thrown everything away for a twisted ideal of a better world.
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“Is this a second chance?” Helena asked, voicing the desperate hope she didn’t dare feel.
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LuzHela laughed, a sound both beautiful and terrifying. “That depends entirely on your definition. It’s a possibility. A blank page, currently soaked in blood and tears. The question isn’t just for him.” She pointed a sharp-nailed finger at Helena. “Your light is dimming. You fought fate your old world arranged for you. You watched your friends break. What will you become here, in this broken sky, with him and the other? Will you try to re-ignite your heart? Or will you let it go out? The other one is here! Still wrapped up in his own narcissism. Will you save him too?”
She stood, offering a hand to Helena, not to pull her up, but as a pact.
“My department is souls, Helena. And this is the most fascinating case I’ve seen in millennia. I’m not here to save you. That’s on you. So,” her smile widened. “Shall we see what story we can write on this blank page? Ah looks like someone is ready to rise to the occasion. Be on alert, we need to fight our way out of this area. “
As they spoke and their hands met, Geto began to stir… @sugurugeto
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The air in this place tasted of stale ozone and pulverized concrete—a sharp, metallic tang that clung to the back of Suguru Geto’s throat.
He didn’t know how he had arrived here. The last thing he remembered was the sensation of fading, the weight of his own choices pressing down on him like a shroud. He blinked, his dark, shoulder-length hair falling over his face as he pushed himself up from the cracked pavement.
The city was a corpse. Skyscrapers leaned against one another like drunken giants, their skeletons stripped bare by vines that seemed to pulse with a sickly, bioluminescent glow. Beyond the crumbling skyline, the sky was a bruised, dusty violet, hanging low and suffocating.
Curse energy, he thought, his hand instinctively twitching toward his side, though his cursed spirits were silent—dormant or perhaps suppressed by this strange, oppressive realm.
A soft whimper behind him broke his focus. Helena.
He swiveled around, his protective instinct flaring. Even in this strange purgatory, she was the one thing he felt tethered to. As his vision cleared, he noticed a figure standing near the jagged edge of a collapsed overpass.
She was tall, her skin the color of a twilight storm, a deep, resonant blue that seemed to absorb the dim light of the sun. But it wasn’t the color that stopped Suguru’s heart; it was the anatomy. The horns that curled like twisted obsidian from her brow, the serrated edge of her movements, the way she seemed to exist between the shadows rather than within them.
Suguru surged to his feet, his posture shifting into a defensive crouch. He slid backward, one arm outstretched, physically shielding Helena behind his tall, slender frame. His eyes—usually calm and calculating—widened, narrowing into slits of pure, cold suspicion.
He scanned her, looking for the tell-tale rot of a cursed spirit, the swirling vortex of negative human emotion that usually defined his existence. He found nothing of the sort. This creature was something else entirely—biological, ancient, and undeniably lethal.
“You’re not a half-curse,” Suguru murmured, his voice a low, dangerous velvet.
He didn’t bow his head. He stared her directly in the eyes, his fingers tensing as he prepared to manifest whatever raw power he had left. He had spent his life surrounded by horrors, but this was a new species of nightmare.
“What are you?” he demanded, his gaze flicking to the monsters crawling on the distant walls before snapping back to her. “And more importantly… why does this place smell like a graveyard that refuses to stay buried?”
Feeling Helena’s hand on his shoulder made him relax a smidge. He was still on guard after Helena’s encounter. But why did he remember a fight ” He felt a strange dizziness, he also couldn’t feel his cursed spirits. “This can’t be happening!”
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The air in this place tasted of stale ozone and pulverized concrete—a sharp, metallic tang that clung to the back of Suguru Geto’s throat. He didn’t know how he had arrived here. The last thing he remembered was the sensation of fading, the weight of his own choices pressing down on him like a shroud. He blinked, his dark, shoulder-length hair falling over his face as he pushed himself up from the cracked pavement.
The city was a corpse. Skyscrapers leaned against one another like drunken giants, their skeletons stripped bare by vines that seemed to pulse with a sickly, bioluminescent glow. Beyond the crumbling skyline, the sky was a bruised, dusty violet, hanging low and suffocating.
LuzHela watched him with a blank expression. She could tell something was not right about him. “What? Can’t fight? Weakling? You better find some strength in you to move those feet or you’ll be eaten alive! ” There was no emotion behind her words. So it made it difficult to know if she was being cruel or just real.
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Helena moved like lightning. She stepped in front of Suguru, her hand pressing firmly against his chest, halting his aggressive advance. Her eyes, usually soft, were now sharp and urgent.
“No, Suguru. Stop.” She glanced back at the towering LuzHela, then at the dizziness clearly affecting Suguru. “She’s not the enemy. Not right now. Look at yourself.”
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“Weakling?!”
Suguru wanted to push past her, but the world tilted violently. The skyline swam, the violet sky dipping and swooping like a sick bird. He swayed on his feet, the metallic taste in his mouth thickening to copper.
“I…” He tried to speak, but his mind was fog. The last time he had felt this powerless, he had been a child watching sorcerers at Tokyo Jujutsu High. He had sworn never to be prey again.
No curses.
The realization hit him like a physical blow. He couldn’t swallow the “monkeys.” He couldn’t command a legion. He was just… Suguru.
“This can’t be happening!” The words tore out of him, rough and raw. He gripped Helena’s arm to keep from falling, his knuckles white. He looked up at LuzHela, the suspicion in his eyes now mixed with something rarer: fear.
The blue entity, LuzHela, observed the breakdown with an almost clinical detachment. However, when a chittering, organic sound began to rise from the rubble beneath their feet, her posture shifted. The serrated edges of her form sharpened.
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“The borderland wakes,” she rumbled. “It smells the confusion in your blood, sorcerer.”
Before Geto could respond, the pavement burst. Tendrils of the bioluminescent vines, thick as pythons and tipped with needle-like thorns, erupted from the ground where Helena stood. They were fast—too fast for a man without his curses.
But LuzHela was faster.
She moved between them, a blur of obsidian and violet light. Where her hand passed, the vines calcified, turning to brittle grey stone before shattering into nothing. She didn’t fight with blows; she fought with absence, silencing the curse-energy of the creatures as if she were erasing them from existence.
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Helena hauled Suguru to his feet, dragging him away from the epicenter of the attack. “We need to move, now. The Spiral Tower is close.” They didn’t notice Tetsuya waiting there.
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“The Spiral…?” Suguru mumbled, his vision tunneling. The pull of unconsciousness was strong, dragging at his limbs. He was vaguely aware of being pulled, of Helena’s firm grip, and of LuzHela walking beside them, her presence a cold, protective wall against the horrors of the necropolis.
The Pull.
It started as a headache—a throbbing ache behind Suguru’s eyes—but it quickly became something physical. A hook behind his sternum, tugging him East. He gasped, tripping over rubble, his hand clawing at his chest.
“Something… something is calling me,” He heard Helena say. He wasn’t sure if she was talking to him or to LuzHela but Helena and LuzHela’s attention were both facing towards the direction of a dark rose cloud of energy in the distance.
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Helena turns to LuzHela. LuzHela nods knowingly at Helena, her usually monotone voice carrying a trace of… hunger. “A resonance. Power. It is ancient. It is waiting.”
Suguru tried to protest their interest weakly. “It’s a trap. You both have targets on your backs, and that thing is bait.”
But the pull was undeniable. For both Helena and LuzHela, it seemed to be a call back to a home they had forgotten.
They were frozen, caught between survival and destiny.
Then LuzHela felt a familiar presence. “Take him.” She points at Geto.
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Tetsuya.
He appeared without sound, stepping out of a shadow that shouldn’t have existed. At first he seemed unremarkable in appearance—average height, unremarkable clothes—but his eyes held the weight of someone who had seen the ends of worlds. He looked at Suguru, then at the pull, then at Helena.
“You’re bleeding from the soul,” he noted flatly to Geto. “If you go toward that energy now, you’ll die before you understand it.”
He moved closer, offering his shoulder as a support. “Come with me. I’ll take you out of this place. A bigger danger is about to shake the grounds we stand on.” His gaze slid to Helena and LuzHela. “The rest is yours to decide. That energy… it wants to be found.”
Suguru, barely holding onto consciousness, looked at Helena. She squeezed his hand.
“Go with him,” she whispered. “I’ll find you when this is done.”
Tetsuya took Suguru’s arm, supporting him as they turned away from the pull. But as they walked, Suguru heard Helena’s voice, firm and determined.
“We’re going to find out what is calling us.”
LuzHela stepped up beside her, and for a moment, the two of them—human and entity—looked like warriors standing before a final boss.
Suguru wanted to argue, to warn them, but darkness finally claimed him, the last thing he saw being the sickly glow of the Spiral Tower in the distance, pulsing like a heartbeat.
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While Geto was taken to safety by Tetsuya. Helena (future Satoru) and LuzHela headed straight for towards the gravitational pull that whispered to their souls.
// End of Helena Satoru and Geto Suguru’s arrival here.//
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