Stratas of Fusion 5 – Nowhere Left

Leslek took a drag from the cigarette.

He had only picked up smoking a few months ago. It had been a spontaneous decision, born from the wish to kill time with something. He had removed his lip piercing soon thereafter, as it got in the way of something he now liked doing more.

The cigarettes did little for him these days. Even the particular blend of enchanted herbs he had acquired from an underground seller of the Hidden Tradition did not really do much. The habit itself, however, was relaxing, if only because it allowed him to sit somewhere on his own and angrily stare holes into the air.

“…It’s all a fucking joke…” he mumbled and ran a hand through his green hair.

He had worn it proud and spiked in the past. A colourful declaration that he could do whatever he wanted. He had been a big fucking deal among the Lake Alliance. Among tens of thousands of people, he had been among the top 6. His teleportation and invisibility let him roll over most Abyssals with ease, even before he brought to bear just how much faster he was than all of them. One time, he had even fought the Gamer himself on almost equal footing!

That had been the turning point for his life.

They had emerged from the Hudson Brawl the losers. Jeremiah disappeared, Lakamun and Helene were dead, and Theron and Remia were fucking cowards that wanted to make peace. In one failed attack, the Lake Alliance, great power of the continent, had been broken by a man that had gotten thrice as powerful since.

It wasn’t fair.

Leslek remembered Emrik taking power. The grey man had always been hovering around the top and Leslek supported him, because that guy at least had a vision for the future where they weren’t pawns to that smug cock. In the end, they still joined the Fusion Federation. Leslek had been against it from start to finish, but he did not have the sway to convince anyone.

In the end, all he could do was follow Emrik. The grey man had instructed Leslek to become part of Fusion’s military, then of Nightfall, to make himself so useful that the Lake Alliance would continue to have sway.

Leslek hated it.

Every day he woke up, he had to go and check missions and spy on people he secretly agreed with. The manifold factions that wished to see Fusion undone, to return to the law of the jungle, in which Leslek thrived and could get what he wanted. Why should the weak have all the same rights as him? They were lesser, in every aspect, and thus what he could do to them was completely justified.

However, to act on those sympathies would have been to invite doom on himself. That bitch Claire and that cunt Siena were always glancing over his shoulder and that scheming harpy was keeping him out of any of the truly important matters. His loyalty was being tested. For that, he did not blame them. Had they been any weaker, he would have gladly slit their throats.

Instead, he had to do their bidding. He had tried so hard to get the Small Lake rebellion to work without getting caught. The assholes had treated him like dirt, but at least they hadn’t given him up before they had gotten crushed under the boot of the First of Wrath.

“Fuck…” Leslek muttered, taking another deep drag of his cigarette. The substances within smoothed over his rage for a moment, leaving him placid enough to view his current situation neutrally.

He was now tracking Hypercrush. Regularly he would have never been given such a mission, sensitive as it was, but with the conniving whores out of the building and the Federation in **** need to catch the Latebloomer, he had been assigned all the same.

Leslek was doing a deliberately poor job of it. He was moving to the areas assigned, then found the quietest corner and had his smokes. They were stretched thin, so no supervisor sat next to him. ‘Entirety of Fusion is trying to get the guy,’ he thought and snickered to himself. ‘’Course they are. If that coked up fiend gets away with it, that’s a major hit to prestige. That’s all that matters between big powers.’

He giggled to himself about the idiocy of it all. They believed John Newman cared about them. Obviously, he didn’t. No one powerful gave a fuck about anything but their own ego. This was all one big masturbatory fantasy, from the pretence of freedom to the rotten core of ‘democracy’ that he pretended to follow.

Leslek giggled some more.

He pulled air through the butt of the cigarette again.

There was nothing left to burn.

The sudden absence of a fresh wave of numbness dragged all the bitter rage back to the surface. “Oh, fuck it all!” he shouted, throwing the cigarette butt forwards. He half expected some Karen to turn his way and bark at him for littering. He was not too far off a busy street.

A busy street that produced no sound.

He raised his head rapidly, suddenly realizing that all was quiet. He raised a hand, feeling the stillness of the winter air. He extended his magical senses and got the confirmation.

He had been pulled into a Trap Barrier.

“I know the pain, my guy, of a joint that has nothing left to give.”

The voice that spoke came from a man who appeared in a rainbow cloud of smoke and light. It was less unsteady than Leslek had heard on the recordings. All around, the **** mage seemed more complete than ever.

His skin was of a healthy flush, his chin clean shaven, and his white hair flowed according to the whim of non-existent winds. Prismatic light danced through the inner streaks, putting a rainbow backdrop to his masculine face. He was smirking, revealing pearly white, perfectly set teeth, and his eyes glowed in all colours, triangular shapes dancing constantly where sclera and irises should have been. A pair of white dots indicated where he was looking.

“Just what I needed,” Leslek groaned. “So, Hypercrush, I would fucking guess?”

“The one and only, the prophet of the high, the foreteller of ecstasy, the demigod of hallucinations.”

“…Is that your actual title or are you just making that up?”

“Ehehehehe, yyyyyyyyyyyyyeees!” Hypercrush pulled his shoulders back. “YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEES!” he roared to the heavens, a beam of light shooting from his mouth that burned a hole through the cover of winter clouds. Suddenly, sunlight flooded the city plaza. “I am what I am and what I am is the climax of climaxes, the ecstasy of ecstasies, the euphoria of euphorias – I am the High that High-Fives!” He put his hand up.

Leslek ignored it. “If you want to kill me, just make it quick,” he said and checked his cigarette box for the next one. He clicked his tongue when he saw that it was empty. “Would be doing me a favour, really.”

“I’m not here to kill you – I can sense in you a fellow acolyte of the high.”

The green-haired man snorted. “I’m nothing like you.”

“But you could be like him.”

A new voice entered the conversation, belonging to a woman that stepped out from behind Hypercrush. She had white hair and wore a white bodysuit similar to his. A cape billowed in the same wind as Hypercrush’s hair. The green eyes of the woman fixed Leslek for a moment, before darting to a candy bag filled with colourful pills. She threw several in her mouth at once.

“You could be like us!” yet another voice declared.

A short, fat man stepped out from Hypercrush’s shadow. He was not even half the height of the **** mage and his belly was barely contained by the belt of his bodysuit. Tight as it was, it also revealed that he had quite a lot of muscle. He was built like the barrel that the whisky in his hand had been aged in.

“We’re all with Hypercrush!”

A third person stepped out from the shadow, a second woman. In addition to the universal tight, white bodysuit, the short-haired blonde wore a nurse’s headpiece. Her blue eyes pierced Leslek like the syringe in her hand pierced her own skin, delivering a pink cocktail into her veins.

“Introduce yourselves!” Hypercrush ordered jovially.

“SAMANTHA, CHOSEN OF THE PILLS!” the hyper white-haired woman declared, putting her left hand in a peace sign in front of her left eye. “I am the bringer of the happies and uppies and joy!”

“Kyle, Chosen of the Bottle!” the fat, short man introduced himself, letting the round container roll over his arms from one wrist to the other, before striking a fighting pose. “I am the bringer of warmth of truth and of good times!”

“Tabbie, Chosen of the Syringes!” the blonde said third, wiggling her hips in a dance before squatting down next to Hypercrush. “I bring the little pain followed by the highest highs!”

“”Together we are: the Hypercrew!””

“You are the world’s gayest supervillains, is what you are,” Leslek stated, who had now, courtesy of how close Tabbie leaned into it, realized that Hypercrush had a very prominent bulge. A detail that he could have lived without. “You’re going to be hunted down by the Gamer and his posse of worldbreaker sluts.”

“No, we will be hunting the Gamer!” Hypercrush stated, rubbing his nose. “I have acquired the ultimate high from my little break-in! Now, I can see radio waves, I can hear fishes think and I can eat the nitrogen in the air!” He clacked his teeth repeatedly at something. “I am the wind of coke, the cannabis oil of change, and I offer to you the power, Leslek! Join us, join my Hypercrew, as Chosen of the Blunts, and together we shall kill the Gamer and turn this federation into a never-ending party!”

Leslek felt the power and conviction resonate with every word. As Hypercrush gestured, rifts in space opened up at his behest. He was a Latebloomer, that much was clear… and if he was a Latebloomer… then perhaps this was the way to kill another one?

“You are insane,” he said to himself and the man in front of him.

“Sure I am, what’s your point?” Hypercrush asked, not even shrugging at the question. “There is no need for sanity in my world! Every water supply will be laced with LSD, every paper soaked, every cigarette filled with every herb, every meal prepared with a side-bowl of shrooms! Everything will be an eternal party, in which we chosen can do whatever we want! Reality is our plaything and the Abyss shall be lit with fires of our blunts!”

Hypercrush bowed down, picking up cigarette butt that Leslek had discarded. In his hands, it transformed into the filter for a joint perfectly rolled and as dense as a proverbial black hole. It was backed with every single smokable **** imaginable. Leslek could smell it, he could see it, he could feel it.

“Join me, Chosen of the Blunt!” Hypercrush preached, offering it to Leslek. “Join me and you will never go sober again!”

Leslek stared at it. There was power there. True power, so much more power than he currently had – and what was the alternative? He would report he had seen Hypercrush and then he would wake up again tomorrow to buy inferior **** from people he did not respect to serve people he hated.

No, there was only one choice.

Leslek swiped the blunt out of Hypercrush’s hands. To the crazy laugh of the others, he put it between his lips and lighted it. He inhaled deeply the smoke of the covenant, let it fill his lungs and vibrate through the rest of his being.

He fell into a world of rainbows. All around him danced colours. They caught him gently. His clothes exploded from him in a glorious liberation. White and colourful fabric was poured over his skinny muscles as ethereal hands combed his sad excuse for hair into a proud mohawk, thicker and spikier than anything he had ever worn before.

When the rainbow dimension released him, he stood on his feet in front of Hypercrush.

“Do you understand now, brother of the sacred high?” the Latebloomer asked.

“Yes!” Leslek shouted, feeling so thoroughly alive. He took another hit of THC and nicotine and so much more. As he inhaled, the winds of resplendent horizons blew over his skin. “I can feel it! I can feel the…” he kept the blunt between his lips, circled his arms around each other then raised them above his head in a crane pose, “…gusts of highs!”

“Then welcome, Leslek, Chosen of the Blunt! We have one more to find and then we will take this horrid federation of order from the hands of the Gamer! Fusion shall be defused, extracted from him like butter draws THC out of marijuana! Yes, yes, yes, YEEEEEEEEEES! The high speaks to me! We must follow the rainbow to the pot of gold that is our eternal high!”

“Oh yes!” Leslek agreed enthusiastically. “We’ll roll ’em all up!”

End of Side Story.