74 Arise

She stares at the…thing below her foot, and she scowls in disgust.

Valper Galilei is his name. An elderly man dressed in a priest's robe, though it hardly looks like one after all the scorching she'd done. The portly old man begs and begs as she slowly crushes his skull beneath her foot. He babbles on and on, speaking of 'profound secrets' she'd already known as facts years before.

She wants nothing more than to kill him. To pierce his chest with a bolt of lightning and just be done with it. 

The beast inside her agrees, and it practically snarls as the man continues to speak on, deluded under some vain hope that it'll endear him enough for her to spare his life.

It won't. It never will.

There are two weeks left before the Pandemonium. Things have been hectic as of late. Issei has not been shy about his plans, and the activity he has spurred is in a league beyond anything she's ever seen. All sorts of people she knows and will come to know are going to-and-fro.

She's barely seen Issei during these times. Last she saw him, he was in Hibana, speaking to the masses over the plans he intends to put on for the future. She hadn't seen him since.

And truthfully, she is bored. There hasn't been much to do as of late, and she's mostly lounged around, staying in Kuoh or Kyoto as she desperately looks for something she can do. Alas, nothing has come up, and she can only sulk as the world wizzes by.

So when she felt a foreign entity enter Kuoh's perimeter, she thought some solution to her boredom had come.

She was right in some aspects. She was hardly bored anymore. But she'd instead traded that boredom for teeth-gritting disgust, holding up a video camera as the man before her continues to speak.

There really is no need to gather more footage—the video Issei has gathered is long enough. But she's bored, so she decided to anyway.

And really, she hasn't learnt anything new. Most of the information the elderly man is so proud of are all old news to her. She's heard it all before, watched them play out through captured footage. She's already felt the rage and horror and pity. 

All she can feel is this muted, dredged disgust.

This whole drivel continues for a few more agonizing minutes, before she finally snaps. She shuts the video camera, and Valper makes an odd squeal as she grinds her foot into his skull. "I grow weary of your words, pig." She says, not quite sure whether it's her speaking or the monster inside her skin. "The delusion you call Faith no longer amuses me."

She sees him try to say something, but she shuts him up by kicking his face into the dirt. "Did I allow you to speak?" She asks, and he only whimpers as he frantically stays silent. "Then don't. You're a pig. Not a boar."

"Y-Yes-"

She kicked him harder. The earth cracked as his face smashed into the soil. "Did I allow you to speak?"

He shakes his head.

She smiles cruelly. "Good." She bends down, and roughly she yanks the white crystal from his back pocket. He'd shown it to her so proudly just minutes ago, and she can't help but smile blandly as she stares at it.

It's disgusting. She can see the thousands of souls trapped inside. Young souls, all slain at the height of their pain and trapped in a cage they can't escape from. And despite that, the crystal shines a bright white, glowing with that distinct Light the Angels are all so fond of. 

Really, she's rather surprised this thing hasn't turned into a curse yet. She supposes it's because of the disgusting amount of Light the elderly man had infused into the crystal.

But if that's the case,

She brings the crystal close, and gently, she whispers, "Wake up."

And immediately the crystal begins to shake. Cracks begin spreading across its surface, and the bright white of its Light suddenly begins to fade, corrupted by a growing taint of swirling purples and blacks. Valper has yet to look up, but even he can feel the growing corruption, and he trembles with fear.

"A thousand torments you have suffered, and a thousand torments you will inflict." The words are tumbling out of her mouth now, but she does little to stop it. "Your anger, your pain, your shame—take them all and retaliate towards your captor a million fold."

She loosens her fingers. The crystal tumbles through the air, and lands perfectly on the elderly man's back.

The crystal is seconds away from breaking. Not a single spot of the previously bright thing is white. It's turned entirely black, and the souls inside are no longer chained down.

She smiles. "Arise."

And they do. The crystal breaks, and the thousands of adolescent souls rush out as a conglomerated mass of ghastly faces, each permanently carved with expressions of pain and terror. There's hardly any intelligence in the chimeric being she's just unleashed, but even it can recognize that the man beneath her feet is the one that killed it when it was alive.

So like a caged beast, it pounces. It slams its entire ghastly mass down onto the unsuspecting man, and Valper screams as the curses of thousands of dying children begin crushing what life remains in his body.

She takes a few steps back and watches. The amalgamated ghastly mass continues to shred through Valper, and he can only scream as thrash as his body is torn apart piece by piece. The sound of crunching echoes into the air. Guts and bone and innards fly into the air, blended into blood before they can even touch the ground. 

And it's…enthralling. She knows that this is pushing it too far, that being fascinated by such instances of death isn't right, but she can't help herself. She's barely holding herself back from stepping forward and letting all the gore shower down on her.

She winces as she clutches her chest. It's the monster inside her. The entity that hides inside her flesh and bones—it hungers for this sort of thing. 

"I want more," it screams. It thrashes about inside her skin, desperately clawing to finally get her to listen to its whispers.

It began years before, and it's only grown ever since. It mostly stays silent when she's in public, but whenever she's either alone or with Issei, it grows exponentially louder. It grates against her senses, begs for her to let loose, asks for her to indulge in every color of Sin.

She doesn't mind it all that much. Really, the only thing it doesn't like is how…conservative she's been in regards to her relationship with Issei. She wants to take it slow, to play out the many romantic dramas she's watched. It wants her to blitz onward, to follow the teachings of the first humans and mate with him until the next week comes.

But she's keeping herself in check. And also because this isn't really the time for it.

Eventually, the crunching stops, and she turns back to see that not a single shred of Valper remains. His corpse, his clothes—all gone sans the massive splodge of blood left upon the soil.

The amalgamated ghastly mass finally turns to her, and she readies herself to destroy it.

Or at least she tries, because before she can even call upon her Mana, another feeling rises in her chest. A feeling of superiority, of power, of control. It's a feeling that's wholly foreign yet painfully familiar, as if the ether of her old life had somehow been caught by this one.

The amalgamated ghastly mass moves towards her, and surprisingly, it then bows. It says nothing, it emotes nothing. And yet she can almost hear its voice. "Praise to the Venerated One." She can almost hear it whisper, its voice garbled and inhumane.

She takes a breath, and she grins. "Arise."

It does. The thousand fixed faces merged into the garbled mass turns to her, every frightened eye focusing on her at once. It would've been terrifying to most. 

Not to her. If anything, she finds it strangely endearing. She doesn't quite know why. "Do you wish to follow me?" She asks. The faces nod, its body warping as the thousand faces nod at once. She hums. "Then you must have a name."

She thinks over it for a few moments. She's never been all that great with names, and neither is Issei. They tend to ask Kanada for help when it comes to naming things. 

Yet a name comes to her mind, and she can't shake it off. 

And so she smiles. "I name you Grima."

The amalgamated ghastly mass—now Grima—howls hauntingly as it trembles. The expression on the thousand faces remains fixed in terror, but she can almost see the delight in those narrowed eyes. It surges forward, and it shrinks into a million threads of black as it merges with her shadow. 

"Huh." She says, staring at her inexplicably darker shadow. "That's convenient."

She turns back to all the blood Valper left behind, and she brings her hand forward. Bolts of plasma begin flying from her fingertips, shooting towards every inch of blood the man had left behind, vaporizing both it and the soil beneath it. Before long, all the blood has evaporated away, leaving behind gashes of melted soil across the ground.

Just like that, another nuisance has been taken care of. Granted, she didn't learn much that would help with the upcoming Pandemonium, but she's gained quite the precious minion.

She'll have to keep Grima away from Kanada and Sae, however. Their hunger for curses is truly astounding, and she's seen them do many things to grasp even the slightest reservoir of Curse Energy.

…

She scratches her head. She's done here, she supposes.

So she turns to the bright blue skies above, and with wings of black crystals sprouting from her black, she takes off into the sky, her form blurring as she breaks through the sound barrier.