A Game of Cat and Mouse
The Backrooms, 2nd Floor.
Endless corridors of bare cement stretched on without end. Rusted wires hung at regular intervals from the ceiling, each one barely supporting a flickering fluorescent tube. Droplets—water or oil, it was impossible to say—fell steadily from above. The floor was cracked and broken in places, its raw underlayer laid bare.
There Minel and the Shocker stood facing each other.
Static poured from the Shocker’s body and burst every remaining light in the corridor. The white glow that had once lit the passage was gone; only the blue radiance spilling from the creature remained. Behind it, the walls were scored with frantic claw marks. Blue lightning spiked up from floor, walls, and ceiling like awls, flashing and vanishing in the air without pause.
“Grrrrr…”
The Shocker suddenly thrust both hands forward. Lightning bloomed from its palms and raced along the iron pipes that ran across the ceiling. In the next instant the entire corridor flared like an electric net.
Minel watched it all without so much as a twitch.
Zzt-zzt-zzt!
The bolts that erupted from the Shocker’s hands first forked wildly through the surrounding space. Moisture in the air, floating dust, the falling droplets of water or oil—anything that could serve as a stepping-stone was claimed as the lightning spread its territory. Countless tiny particles became its path. The endlessly branching tips finally touched a single strand of Minel’s hair.
One impossibly thin thread of light.
Yet the connection itself was all that mattered.
The electricity that formed that thread set the nearby air spinning in a tiny vortex. Once set in motion, the air’s rotation drew still more electricity. By that suction every aimless bolt that had been scattering in all directions suddenly poured into the same path.
It was the same principle as pricking a fully inflated balloon: everything rushes out through the single opening at once. Electricity spun the air; the spinning air summoned more electricity. A perfect cycle of mutual reinforcement.
The faint thread, barely visible a moment before, thickened at an exponential rate as lightning was sucked into it from every side—nail-thin, then finger-thick, then as thick as a forearm. When it finally reached the girth of a human torso it could no longer hold and detonated.
KRA-KOOM!
A combined discharge of 1.42 billion volts. The surrounding temperature spiked to 25,000 degrees Celsius. Air that had undergone phase transition became plasma, glowing with a soft blue light.
No human body could ever withstand such a thing.
And yet Minel remained standing exactly where he was.
His eyes were completely unfocused, as if he were gazing at distant mountains.
What had that sensation just now been?
It felt as though time itself had slowed to a crawl. The lightning had taken only 0.2 seconds from the moment of its birth to the flash before his eyes—yet he had seen every detail of it, as clear as slow motion.
“Grrrrr!”
The Shocker’s roar of pure rage shook the corridor. Only then did Minel snap back to himself.
Think about it later.
He muttered the words under his breath, spun on his heel, and put distance between himself and the creature at high speed.
The Shocker split its mouth wide, baring its teeth. It still could not believe what had happened yesterday—that this human had taken its lightning and simply run away as if nothing had happened. The event had been so unreal that the Shocker had half-convinced itself it must have been a mistake. The attack just now had erased every last doubt.
Lightning did not work on Minel at all.
“Grrrrr!”
The Shocker gathered its forelegs. Electricity began to gather across its body once more; static arced outward and painted everything blue. The moment Minel vanished around a corner, the creature drove power into its legs. The lightning it generated incinerated every molecule of air ahead of it, carving a vacuum tunnel. Feeling its body being sucked forward, the Shocker simply rode the pull.
The vacuum’s suction became the foundation for a speed beyond imagination. In a single motion the Shocker crossed from one end of the corridor to the other.
BOOM—!
At the same instant it swept a foreleg through the space where Minel should have been. Not after arriving—while still in motion, anticipating the landing. This time it was certain it would not miss.
Nothing touched its claws.
“Grrrrr…”
Empty eyes turned toward its own foreleg. By pure sensation it had been far faster than yesterday, yet the result was identical. Why?
“Shocker!”
A loud voice from the side made the creature whip its head around. There, down the opposite corridor, Minel stood waving at it.
The Shocker’s face began to twist. Once again it could not understand what had just occurred. It had moved at the absolute limit of its speed—yet in that same span of time Minel had covered the same distance. Never once in its life had the Shocker seen anything match its velocity. Never once had anything survived the lightning it unleashed. That towering pride shattered into pieces.
A deep, seething unpleasantness rose inside it—the same unpleasantness it had tasted for the first time yesterday, only stronger now. The Shocker ground its teeth. Instinct told it exactly how to erase that feeling.
That thing.
It had to die.
This time there was no warning. Forelegs gathered; the instant the lightning coalesced, the Shocker moved.
BOOM—!
A motion indistinguishable from teleportation, followed at once by a sweeping foreleg strike. The massive paw raked through the exact spot where Minel had been standing a heartbeat earlier.
Once more it carved only empty air.
Strange. It was as if he had never existed at all; not even a trace remained. The Shocker raged and scanned its surroundings. Nothing but empty corridors. The fluorescent tubes had long since burst; the only light left was the blue flare rising from its own body. Its grotesquely warped shadow writhed across walls and floor.
“Shocker.”
That familiar, thoroughly irritating voice. The creature spun again. This time Minel was perched high on an iron pipe mounted at a distant corner. His silhouette, cut out against residual light, was as sharp as moonlight—a calm, infuriating presence that seemed to melt into the pale glow.
Minel narrowed his eyes and gave a lazy wave, beckoning. From a certain angle it almost looked playful.
The unpleasantness inside the Shocker surged. Mockery was something even a beast of scant reason understood on pure instinct. Something like a heart began to overheat. The Shocker’s entire body trembled as it hurled lightning toward the ceiling once more.
Crack-crack-crack!
Pzzzt-pzzzt!
The bolts racing along the pipes shrieked like someone screaming. Minel made no attempt to dodge; he simply stayed where he was. The lightning reached him, flashed across his body, and was absorbed into floor and wall, vanishing without a trace.
Leaning against the wall, Minel raised a hand and waved again.
The Shocker could no longer restrain the questions and fury boiling inside it. This was not a chase. It was not any form of combat. Minel was simply playing—playing tag.
The yellow light nested in those empty eyes deepened without end until it rivaled the creature’s own blue radiance. Reason collapsed. Again forward. Again the attack. Again the lightning. The Shocker pursued as instinct demanded.
Yet somehow Minel was always half a beat ahead. Arrive—and he was gone. Turn—and he appeared on the opposite side. Fire lightning—and he stood still. Move again—and he vanished. The Shocker clung stubbornly to the belief that sooner or later it would catch him. The same sequence therefore repeated without end.
In the process Minel even found leisure enough for a brief remark.
“It’s like a cat.”
Exactly so. Using himself as bait, Minel was steering the giant lightning-cat called the Shocker wherever he pleased.
Of course, he could only do so thanks to Chori’s help. The instant before the Shocker leapt, an entrance would open right beside Minel; step through and an emergency corridor appeared, and opening the door next to that led straight to the next corner. Farther down the hidden passage Chori kept creating more doors without pause.
“You can do it!”
“Mm.”
Chori’s short cheer rang out as more entrances bloomed. Minel ducked in and out of them, matching the Shocker’s speed exactly. The 2nd Floor was nothing but corridors and corners—a simple layout that made luring prey effortless.
KRA-KOOM!
Zzt-zzt-zzt!
KRA-KOOM!
Zzt-zzt-zzt!
One shadow and one streak of lightning raced after each other, steadily drawing closer to a single destination: the heart of Miller’s stronghold.
There Hina waited, ready to receive them both.
“Huu…”
The weapon resting on her shoulder was a 30 mm anti-materiel sniper rifle of unreal size. Gifted with firearms, Hina had mastered it completely in half a day; she now handled it as freely as a pistol.
The wall beside her suddenly clanked open in the shape of a door. Minel stepped out and spoke.
“Now.”
Hina nodded and set her eye to the scope. Then she fired—not at a living target, but straight into the thick wall in front of her.
THOOM-KRA-KRA-KOOM!
The sonic blast of the 30 mm round was ear-splitting. Flame bloomed from the muzzle like a dragon’s roar. The massive metal slug began punching through every makeshift barrier the Miller Party had erected.
One layer.
Two.
Three.
None of them mattered. The walls were not obstacles; they were merely scenery that shattered along the bullet’s path.
In that same moment the Shocker felt a strange emotion. The enormous something blocking the corridor was human architecture the likes of which it had never seen. And then that “door” exploded into fragments. From its center a round object punched upward and smashed into the creature’s flesh.
Even a beast specialized in destruction and slaughter felt the word “fear” flash through some deep, unconscious corner of its mind. Feeling it and dodging it, however, were entirely different problems. The round that could pierce tank armor shattered the Shocker’s left shoulder.
CRACK!
Flesh burst, bone flew, the entire body twisted. The shock half-lifted the Shocker into the air before it crashed to the corridor floor with a heavy thud.
Zzt… zzt…
The lightning that had surged like a storm lost its way and scattered in every direction. Fluorescent tubes flickered weakly back to life, one by one, then died again. The air grew lighter; the suffocating pressure drained away like air leaving a balloon.
The Shocker lay with one arm ruined, staring at the ceiling in pure confusion. It could not understand what had just happened. One instant it had been watching. The next, something had erupted and driven straight through its shoulder.
Empty eyes blinked again and again.
Then one wall opened in the shape of a door and Minel stepped into view. This time he did not wave. Cold, indifferent. He simply regarded the Shocker with the solid gaze of someone who already knew victory was certain.