kaisou | [sermon ?] —if you wanna cry, use my heart

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nicholas d. wolfwood (t:s)

[sermon ?] —if you wanna cry, use my heart

WHO: Nicholas D. Wolfwood and you.
WHERE: the Metaverse - Noman's Land
WHEN: the month of May
WHAT: sọ̸͒m̷̥̽ĕ̷̛̜̺t̶̐̃ͅ𝔱𝔦𝔪𝔢𝔰

the Eye of Michael and Nicholas D. Wolfwood, Pastor of the St. Michael's Church, do hereby enter into the following contract with respect to their work. the Pastor agrees to faithfully perform all duties as commanded in the Eye of Michael, effective ████ ███, █.█. ███, and to abide by all rules and regulations swearing in the name of the two Angels sent by God.

the Pastor agrees to receive immortal glory from the Priest ███████ through the Suffering of the Holy Angels.

in the event of abandonment of his duties, or in the event that the Executive Board determines that there is sufficient cause, the Pastor shall be permanently expelled from the Eye of Michael and St. Michael's Church, and the family members of the Pastor shall be Subject to the same punishment.

WARNINGS: medical experimentation, insects, body horror, needles, religious trauma, gore, death.

??? — NOMAN'S LAND — summaries and links

♫ HUNGRY!

Are you ever going to be fast enough to outrun everything, Judas?

ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOPELAND;

The Dormitories and the Laboratories

Hopeland Orphanage, in its good and not so good days. Shadow Wolfwood will tell you to go the Laboratories; the Eye of Michael's enforcers wait to inject you with the drugs in Wolfwood's vials and make you better. Livio wants you to find the other children and bring them back to safey, but will eventually leave to find Wolfwood himself no matter how fast you go. Fight your way through the lab or save the children; both choices deliver you to the belly of the Eye.

CHILD OF BLESSING;

The Eye of Michael HQ

The Eye of Michael's training facilities and Plant storage. Once you're far enough in, you'll meet another Wolfwood who wants nothing more than to shoot you dead; you can either confront him or go around him. Going around him leads to a repeating looping of classrooms and expendable young Eye of Michael goons; going through him will be a battle to not get shot by a skittish, defensive little gunman who's very good at what he does. Both paths will lead to Legato Bluesummers and an older, enhanced Livio. Disabling or killing Legato and Livio will let you out into Julai in the middle of its last hour.

HIGH NOON AT JULY;

Julai

The city of Julai in its final day. You're emerging from ground zero of the Eye of Michael's weird cult tower and the city is being overrun by a giant plant organism that looks like Vash's mother. The military think you're part of it and will try and stop you, and the people of Julai are being menaced and mulched by the plants. Help them, or run. If you linger for too long, Millions Knives will find you and attempt to reduce you to fertilizer despite the best efforts of the Humanoid Typhoon that Wolfwood remembers. Eventually, the twins will go up--and everything will go white when they come back down.

HUMANITY;

In Kaisou

Trying to enter the Metaverse immediately after the July Incident is an exercise in futility. Wolfwood's space is just white static and the phantom feeling of coarse sand and unrelenting heat on your skin. You have been returned to Cathedral Hill for at least a night.

THE RUNNJING MAN;

THE the Outskirts of Julai;

Julai City is a hole that seems to span forever and all that's left are clouds of glimmering Worms and a rusted metallic scrapyard. In the center of the scrapyard, you'll find Nicholas D. Wolfwood at odds with Nicholas the Punisher. They're bound to the duty that they can't put down, the Cross Punisher standing like a tombstone in the middle of a sandy arena. The bigger, hungrier Worms will try their luck with bringing down all of you fresh hunks of meat. Save Wolfwood. End this.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

♫ Looming Crisis ♫

When the ark fell from the sky all those years ago, we sinners were cast upon this desolate planet. Now, brothers and sisters of the faith, join me in prayer as we ask God to send his Angel of Salvation our way. Praise the Angel. Honor the Angel. become the Angel's eyes in this world. May the Lord bless you, o Faithful One.

When the twin Angels descend upon us, a bridge of light will cross the sky. that's when we sinners shall be redeemed, and the Lord will lead us into His kingdom—

An unseen loudspeaker drones on overhead. Every line of the sermon is laced with a sense of fatalistic despair, and a promise that death is a reward. A gift. A blessing. The people of No Man’s Land deserve nothing less than perdition, but God in His infinite love will forgive, will wipe the slate clean and use the blood of the unworthy to grow the garden anew. Paradise is close enough to touch, if only for a little sacrifice from you selfish monsters for once--

Don’t listen to the preaching for too long. It’ll start to make sense if you aren’t careful. It’s hateful dreck, meant to worm its way into your ears and make you weak, make you compliant, make you stand still.

The Eye of Michael’s facility stands in stark contrast to the ramshackle, well-worn orphanage, all sleek and metal and too white and chrome for comfort, and peeking into the doors that dot the winding hallways will reveal what can only be described as classrooms–rows upon rows of small chairs and small desks and whiteboards scrawled with equal parts perverted religious tenets (‘thou shalt kneel before the Angels, thou shalt see Their work done, thou shalt give thine life in pursuit of Eden’) and practical lessons about the best places to put a bullet through a man to snuff them out. If you try the doors, they're unlocked, but the rooms remain empty.

Continuing on, there's a definitive line between the purposes of the facility–the hallway terminates, the walls coming to an abrupt stop in favor of a sudden transition to a metallic catwalk. The room opens up, and catwalks crisscross the room with no particular rhyme or reason as to where they come from or where they go; but if you can see through the low light, you can see that the walls are absolutely covered in rows upon rows of blood red pods with odd white seeds floating in the middle of them.

There's an electric hum in the air.

If you can speak with plants.

The sisters in the pods are begging for the pain to end. They feel like they're falling apart, like they're crumbling, save them, save them, save them-

Once you've hit the midway point of the biggest catwalk, the lights will kick on to reveal that the room is lined with the blood-red seed pods, cut through with the tangle of catwalks and odd clusters of tubes and wires that dangle down and lace through the catwalks as if they're veins winding through a grander body, and that Nicholas D. Wolfwood is looking down on you from a layer above with the same flinty-eyed, unhappy moue.

He's cradling a sniper rifle in his arms.

Oi, oi. You don’t belong here and orders are orders. Stay still.

Do not stay still. He aims for the head and he’s a very, very good shot.

There's another large door on the same level as Wolfwood that he seems to be loosely guarding, fifteen feet up and backlit blue.

You could also decide not to deal with any of that and try your luck with the classrooms-they were unlocked, after all.

⇉ head straight through Wolfwood.

A few of the catwalks have ladders dangling off of them, and the wire clusters will support the weight of most people–but Wolfwood is very good at what he does, aiming relentlessly for hands and heads alike to keep you down, to drop you dead. He’s definitely playing at being a man of few words, but just like his older self, he’s not impervious to running his mouth. He’s also hesitant to aim anywhere near the Plant jars that ring the room. In the end, the mission is simple; climb up however you can. Throw things in the way, shoot him first, or tank the shots–Wolfwood has to reload, and when you reach the same platform as him, he’ll withdraw to the door and flee through it.

He can’t afford to die yet, no matter how much he wishes he could. The door will bring you into another sterile white room. There's no sign of Wolfwood there, but you will be reunited with the friends that chose going around instead of through... as well as a pair of new figures, one of which might strike you as terribly familiar if you spent any time at all considering Livio.

There are consequences for every mistake you make, after all. Hope you can live with that.

⇉ navigate the classrooms.

If you weren't the climbing rope kid in gym class, maybe it's time to say 'fuck all of that' to trying to out obstacle course a child sniper–the classrooms are unlocked, and upon returning to them, you’ll find that they’re as messily intertwined as the rooms in the orphanage had been.

They’re also not as empty as they seemed to be at first glance.

The masked members of the Eye of Michael are pointedly smaller that the ones from the first section. Where their larger counterparts could pose a threat, the smaller ones seem to be more concerned with swarming en masse, with trying to drag people down and overwhelm them. They ‘die’ in a good hit or two, crumpling into piles of empty clothes and unseeing mask-glass eyes. It’s a bit of blur, moving from one room to the next, going through the motions over and over and over again, cutting down all of the faceless nobodies that stand between you and your goal, everything playing on repeat as if everyone here trying to stop you from reaching the next checkpoint is expendable, forgettable–as if Wolfwood’s tried very hard not to remember the children he left behind, that he surpassed.

The writings on the board get more and more unhinged until it’s just violent scrawling about how worthless humanity is, with crude childish drawings of the dead and dismembered filling the spaces between. Eventually, when the rooms are at their most shattered and ramshackle, an oddly out of place metallic door will sit pretty and pristine against the far wall. The note on the last whiteboard is neatly written and purposeful.

If you had fallen in line sooner, it would not have had to come to this.
Stepping through the door will bring you back to the fools who braved the sniper, as well as a new pair of friends who don’t intend to let you go much further.

The Wire Spider and the One You Failed to Protect

An unsightly infestation of vermin in the Master's house? You will be dealt with quickly.

It is offensive to Legato Bluesummers that you’re here, in this white-on-white version of the chapel that the Midnight Channel held its mass in, stain-glass windows depicting the avenging angels coming down to reap the mankind’s sinful in order to build a new garden of Eden. It’s priority one for him to make you very aware of that fact. He’ll stay back towards the door at the front of the church and reach out towards you, into you, digging into your limbs with what feels like thin wires and take you for his own–and then he’ll turn you on your friends since he can’t just snap you in half like all of the ones that had come before… not that it will stop him from trying. He’s incredibly persistent… but he’s only human, no matter how he might present himself.

Livio on the other hand doesn’t have much to say, but he’s as vicious as his brother was, charging you with a pair of cross-shaped guns that he intends to empty into you or beat you with, whichever one makes you stop moving first. Unlike Legato, who’ll go down if you hit him hard enough or in the correct spaces, Livio will just keep getting back up, tanking through the punishment and working to silently keep you away from Legato, from the exit to the rest of Wolfwood’s own personal hell… but he’s also only human. Hit him in the right spot and he’ll stay down.

… or there’s a familiar silver lighter and a pack of cigarettes sitting in one of the pews, if you want to try the gentler route. It’s Wolfwood’s brother, after all. He did all of this to protect him, as futile as it was in the end.

Disabling or destroying Legato and Livio will leave the door to beautiful, sprawling Julai city wide open.

[Persephone pays the sermon no mind. She has seen countless faiths spring up and die through human existence. None of it truly matters- belief can last for millennia or it can burn out in a few centuries. Belief keeps her existence turning, and in that she supposes it plays its part. But humanity always find something else to tie themselves to, to try and understand how the planet still turns.

None of this matters to her. She's trying to locate Nicholas. She strides through it all- eyes forward, determined and unbending. She left Cerberus behind for this, a fact she is glad for with all the clambering around that must be done.

The plants do give her pause. She cannot speak to them, but plants are always deeply connected to her. It's part of her very nature. So she stops, looking at them, brow furrowed. She understands Vash has... something to do with this. Which is why he is... well, how he is. But she doesn't have all the pieces. It does not matter. She walks on.

And then she hears Nicholas. She eyes the gun. She eyes the classrooms. She huffs out a breath, vines grow around her feet, conjured from nothing, ready to shield her from the bullets. ]

No. I don't think I will, actually.

[She looks over at you.]

Be ready to move.

[From the start, he's felt that this entire place is wrong, and the further he goes in with others, the more and more uneasy he gets. He's journeyed alongside Persephone as a precaution for her (even though he knows she can take care of herself, he's seen her around), and also to make sure he isn't going by himself here.

And then he sees the younger Nicholas, hand grabbing his own revolver in retaliation. Shit. He can't shoot a kid, but he sure as shit isn't gonna take being shot at either.

At the warning though, his feet spread apart slightly, and he nods.]

Yeah, got it. I'll keep my eyes peeled.

[ it takes everything in him to not run his mouth like the preteen shithead he is.

he kisses his teeth and levels the rifle while they're talking and takes the shot--pop, pop, one after another, and then gets up from his kneeling brace to relocate further down the catwalk in order to take a new position and try to do something about those vines. ]

[Persephone would never deem to say she'd need anyone's help for anything. But... she does know it's prudent to not go to places like this alone. There is strength and power in numbers, that is a fact as old as time. She is careful- she's learned a lesson about how dangers mortals can be- especially with their guns. She is a God. She is immortal. But a bullet to the heart will still end this life, and she does not have the years it would take to reemerge into another life.

...Plus she doubts Dante would be all that happy if she ended up in his nephew.

The bullets pop off and she ducks behind her more vines, one bullet cuts through and grazes her shoulder. She swears under her breath. She can feel her body already healing it, but it's not a quick process. ]

We need to get up at him. Preferably by disarming him first. I don't know about you, but even I cannot survive a bullet to the head.

Lucky for you, I can.

[ before either persephone or nero have time to stop him dante breaks out into a sprint, racing past them before straight down the catwalk. he's being reckless, he knows he is, but he doesn't care. the sooner they get through here and to wolfwood the better. so he doesn't take care to dodge, he doesn't duck behind cover, he heads straight to the teenage form of nicholas d. wolfwood intending to take his attention from the others. ]

[Persephone has the way of it- though Nox makes the mistake of turning his head to view her vines, and takes a bullet right through his shoulder as a result. There's a loud audible swear at that, hand to the wound even as he can feel his demon snarl in retaliation. The injury won't last long, even though blood is visible.

Still, the interruption's a welcome one, and the devil hunter can't help but exhale in amusement.

To Persephone:] I'd say you hit the jackpot, then.

[Nox doesn't even bother to stop Dante, knowing how futile it'd be, and he just grins.]

'Cause now you've got two shields who can.

[Following right after his uncle, and this time? He's keeping an eye on where the kid goes, making sure he doesn't lose sight of him.]

[ most people don't run towards the teenager with a gun? ]

What's wrong with you?

[ there's three targets and he really should be keeping his cool, working on suppressing all of them but the big dude is running towards him and something feels weird about hurting a plant of any kind so he levels the rifle again, aiming for Dante

the first shot hits the shin--he grimaces like it wasn't intentional, breathes out

and the second shot goes right through the center of Dante's fivehead, the kid breathing out as he backs up, hand snapping down to unload and reload the rifle at lightning speed, ducking behind a throbbing cluster of wires for cover as he does so. ]

[You know what, younger Wolfwood has it exactly right. Just what in the hell is WRONG with you people? Because there is, indeed, something fundamentally broken about this family. ]

That's not what I mean you-

[And off goes Nero too. She tilts her head skywards, chooses to blame Pan for this (because this feels like something he would do) and then heads after the pair. She watches the gun go off and feels fear for a moment- just a brief spike of anxiety. The memory of watching Demeter get gunned down is never far from her. ]

You absolute IDIOT.

[That's in case he wasn't bluffing about the taking a bullet thing. Instinct tells her to take out the kid. But this is Wolfwood... or a version of him, and it's enough to make her pause. She's seen plenty of death, it is her domain after all, and children are no exception to their end. But being the cause of it for a child is a step too far.

So she focuses on the kid's feet, her eyes glowing yellow as plantlife seems to come from nowhere, tangling around his legs, trying to pull him down- or at the very least STILL him. ]

[ do you want the short or long version?

the first shot hits his shin and pain shoots up through his leg, it isn't enough to slow him down because he keeps moving as if he hadn't even been shot in the first place. and then the gun goes off a second time.

the bullet hits him square in the head, his vision going white hot as falls back onto the catwalk unmoving. you wouldn't be amiss to think that the shot killed him, that for all his talk of being able to take a bullet, it was nothing more than talk. one, two, three--

with a pained groan, dante pushes himself back catching the yellow plantlife coming up and tangling around wolfwood's legs from the corner of his eyes. he laughs, bringing a hand to his forehead and smearing red across his face. ]

Nice shot.

[ he breaks out into a sprint once again, red energy crackling around him as he shifts into his devil trigger and takes off. hopefully with wolfwood entangled dante can disarm him and they can move on. ]

But not good enough!

[(3)

While the others are hesitating to shoot a kid, Jun won't have such hesitations. Maybe it's because he's already in a bad mood from reliving what it's like to be a test subject, or maybe it's because he just watched Dante get a headshot which made this feel a bit more real. Or really, most likely, it's because Seal Knights just are that kind of ruthless.

Whatever the case may be, while Wolfwood is distracted with Dante, Shroud will move out of his hiding spot. He'll raise his arm and summon a couple of arrows of light- launching them towards Wolfwood.

Unfortunately, it's not really a clean shot between his angle and the fact he is trying to avoid hitting Dante's devil trigger. Instead, the arrows fly wide and hit walls instead, exploding into light upon impact.]

CHILD OF BLESSING;

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cw: boom, headshot

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