"Secondary form: Akimbo Amplified."
Each of J's blades were imbued with a plasmic blue. An intense heat could be felt emanating off its steel. As the tenants began advancing their strikes towards him, he raised his blades and swung.
"No—!" Cynthia yelped, watching in the distance as streams of blue could be seen slashing through the bodies of the tenants. Bodies were divided and limbs were hacked off. J was waving his Duality with precision and speed. His blue swords moved throughout his enemies like waves gliding smoothly along the ocean floor. The scene was chaotic, yet J's movements were intricate. In concert with the blood from his foes that dripped around him in a circle, he dodged and weaved to avoid the attacks thrown by the tenants.
How does he do that? I wondered. If it were me in there, I would have died from the first strike thrown my way.
"We were supposed to save them…" Cynthia whimpered.
"Can't dwell on it now," Celeste told her. "If it weren't for Gateway, we would have died in there. Look at how they're approaching J. They couldn't be saved. Some sacrifices needed to be made."
"But aren't they just being controlled? What if they don't have any power over their actions? What if they're not actually truly dangerous?"
"They may have not been like that at heart. But right now, that's not up to us to decide." I remembered what the General had told us about J. His mind worked like a computer. Decisions were made based on cause and effect. The reasoning he used was very minimal. If he deduced someone was a threat off of enough decisive proof, he'd take action into his own hands. Since J was already in the midst of killing them, it meant that they were considered too dangerous for us to tolerate.
We watched as tenants continued to pile into the hall from the staircase. It didn't look like the flood would end anytime soon. We could only see the faint glow of J's green eye as he sliced and weaved his way through the crowd of tenants.
"The staircase and elevator are blocked off," Kyra pointed out. "Sav, it's getting dangerous for us to stay up here."
"On it." Sav stood in front of us and pointed his palm at our feet. "See y'all on the other side!"
"Is J going to be okay alone up there?" Emanuel asked.
"Don't underestimate anyone from the first division," Kyra told him. "You saw how he handled himself. He should be fine. What we need to do right now is ensure our safety and call for back-up—"
"Look!" Cynthia interrupted her. She pointed towards the lobby entrance, to which we were all caught by surprise. A massive group of tenants were already there, blocking off any exit possible for the building. But they didn't approach us in the same aggressive manner as the ones on the fifth floor. They simply stood there.
"They're preventing us from leaving…?" My mind was spiraling at this point. "There's no way they have any free will at this stage. Someone is definitely controlling them."
"Who? From where?" Emanuel looked around with his Fractal, trying to see if he could notice something the rest of us couldn't. Kyra did the same with Panorama, attempting to see if there was something out of the ordinary like with the receptionist's Fractal the other time. But as they frantically looked around us, it was clear we were in the unknown. Whoever was controlling the tenants was trying to keep us here.
"I don't wanna be stuck in this building again!" Cynthia yelled. "Can't you teleport us outside, Sav?"
"Sure can." He pointed his arm at our feet and began to activate his Fractal. Right before we could be transported through the wormhole, his motion was bluntly interrupted by an object that was thrown at his hand. It smacked him and fell to the floor, shattering into small pieces of glass that had fallen out of a frame.
It was Celeste's glasses.
"Celeste?" Kyra looked at him. "Why'd you do that?"
Celeste himself looked confused. He held his hand in front of his face, looking at it in an unnatural way as it trembled. "What just happened…?"
"You interrupted my wormhole formation, is what happened," Sav said. "You even broke your glasses!"
We all looked at the glassy mess on the floor, confused as to why Celeste had just done that.
"I didn't throw my glasses…"
"But you did…" I said, pointing to its remains on the ground.
"But, I didn't. It just happened out of nowhere…"
Weirded out, yet eager to leave the building and get past this awkward moment, Sav retried his formation of a wormhole. "Don't go interrupting me this time, alright Celeste? We'll get you new glasses."
He clenched his palm and began to do the twisting motion again, when suddenly—
Shank!
A tiny glass shard swiftly impaled Sav's hand, puncturing a specific spot that made him yelp in pain.
"Youch—!!!" His hand stung in a way it hadn't ever before. He tried looking for the shard embedded in his hand, but realized that it might have been too deep to pull out with his fingers. As he tried to clench his palm like before, he felt an immense throb in his hand prevent him from doing so. His hand felt stuck in an awkward, open position.
We all looked to Celeste, who was crouched next to the pile of shattered glass with some of the shards in his own hands. "What…?"
"What are you doing?!" I called him out. "You're purposely trying to sabotage Sav's wormholes!?"
"I-I'm not…"
"What do you mean 'you're not'? That's two times already! First with your glasses, and now with a shard!"
"Guys…" Sav suddenly brought the attention to himself. "My hand… I can't clench it. The glass is makin' it hurt real bad. I don' think I can make a wormhole right now, not unless this shard is taken out…"
"What about your left hand?" I asked, alarmed.
"Only small objects work with it. I've been trainin' my right hand more often to transport bigger things like people… Left hand won't cut it."
Hearing this, Kyra was quickly ignited. "Celeste! You did this!"
"I didn't!" His hands continued to tremble.
"You can't deny it! You even used 'Trajectory' to get that shard embedded into a pressure point in his hand! Didn't you?"
"But I didn't… It just happened! I didn't do it!"
She suddenly grabbed Celeste by the collar, roughly pulling him up from the ground. "You interrupted Sav twice while he was trying to transport us out of here, and now you've injured his hand so he can't use Gateway when we need it. What the hell are you trying to do? Are you trying to keep us trapped in here?!?"
This sudden commotion escalated my anxiety. First, we'd been unexpectedly ambushed by the tenants we were initially trying to save. Now, as we were about to leave the building, Celeste, one of our very own, was sabotaging our escape.
I had no clue what was going on anymore.
"I don't know what's happening!" Celeste yelled back at Kyra. "I didn't even know Trajectory was active until after what'd happened! First, I was just standing there, and then before I knew it, I was throwing my glasses and shards at Sav's hand! I don't know what's happening to me right now!"
Kyra was fuming, but she didn't know how to respond. Celeste was clearly in distress, an expression opposite to the actions he performed. His eyebrows were furrowed with worry, evident without the glasses on his face. His hands trembled severely, that he even tried taking deep breaths to calm it down. He was not in the usual arrogant state we all knew him for. He looked panicked, and more than anything, confused.
"I don't feel natural with my body right now… Those actions weren't my own," Celeste claimed. "I think someone's controlling me…"
"Urk—!" Cynthia grunted. We looked her way as she'd suddenly hunched over.
"Cynthia?" Emanuel came to her side. "Are you okay?"
"I'm hardened…?" She tried to move, but she couldn't. Cynthia was stuck in place. "I can't move!"
"What do you mean?" Emanuel tried pulling her up from her hunched position, but she was as stiff as steel. He also noticed something prominent about the surface of her skin and clothing.
"You're hard…"
"I know! My Fractal's activated right now for some reason!" Cynthia struggled to shake out of it. "I can't turn it off! I'm stuck like this!"
"What's going on right now?" Kyra looked around. There were a number of inexplicable things happening one after the other.
"You too…?" Celeste said to Cynthia. "You can't control it either, can you?"
"N-No…"
I started piecing together. Both Celeste and Cynthia were acting as if their Fractals were out of their control. This was while the tenants in the building were all moving as if clearly under someone's control. Putting two and two together, I'd finally connected the dots.
"Someone's taking control of Celeste and Cynthia too!"