You Always Build It Better the Second Time Around

Chapter 18 - Enough (Of This)

The following night Yuichiro didn't come like I had expected, nor hoped for. He also doesn't come the night after. However, Nikolai does. But he doesn't come to me; he makes me go to him. The Yoichi, Mitsuba, and Krul aren't brought along, too, which makes me question what Nikolai would want with me personally. The walk down the unfamiliar corridor is cut short, and so is my analyzing of the layout I'm memorizing for future reference. There are seven more doors until the end of the corridor when the man escorting me to Nikolai takes me to a room. But not just any room. The main lab. This room looks even larger than the building itself from the outside. There's no way this is in one single realm, which will make escaping even more difficult than it already is. 

Like heat lamps over plants, there are blue lanterns hung at every station and over the counters that are filled with exotic materials of all sorts that I know can't be from the human realm, nor just a single other realm. The materials and the things in this room are from across hundreds of thousands- perhaps millions of other realms Nikolai has somehow obtained. For a moment I think it's impossible, and then I remember he has Heaven's Crown, or perhaps the location of it. Even if he did have Heaven's Crown, which at this point I'm sure he does, no one would know it's missing, because no one knows of it's location where it was secured and sealed off from the gods who wish to obtain and/or destroy it.

All of this is possible, and it's all because of Heaven's Crown. But what I don't get is why there are things- pieces, being worked on and engineered. Whatever it's for, I fucking hope he's not going to do anything to Yuichiro, even if he does succeed with Heaven's Crown.

A light flickers on upon my arrival, featuring another one of the cylindrical human test tubes, only it's not empty.

Upon seeing him so helpless and fragile, my blood runs colder than ice.

"Do you like it?" Nikolai chuckles.

"What the fuck are you doing?" I snap at him, the guard who escorted me here now having to pull me back from Nikolai.

Nikolai keeps the smirk on his face as he hands me a manila folder from the man beside him who then resumes with the machine that is hooked up to Yuichiro's body. I take it from his hands quickly and open it up to the document he wishes for me to see.

"What is this...?" I breathlessly ask, skimming through the paragraphs of words and pictures I can't believe. Surely this is a dream. Please, make this a mere nightmare I will awaken soon enough from.

"The plans I will be making, and the changes to this simple body," he explains, placing a hand on the glass prison Yu is kept unconscious within. No doubt this is how he performs his experiments. But just what are the experiments he's running before the Heaven's Crown experiment undergoes? And for what purpose are all the other familiars taking part in it for? "His body as it is now- mostly human with the exception of being a fox and not really human to begin with, is not going to be able to last the procedure, nor survive Heaven's Crown and his... liveliness."

"What do you mean by that?" I cautiously ask him, roughly shrugging off the hands of the guard from my shoulders. Nikolai only hums, as if amused by all of this. "Answer the fucking question, you bastard!"

"It means Heaven's Crown is even more dangerous than forming a contract with a demon while being a mere human. Demons feed off of desire. Heaven's Crown plants desire, and I control Heaven's Crown, and what I want is for the realms to burn into oblivion. Not only do I want Yuichiro's body to belong to me-"

"Not going to happen."

"-But I also want Heaven's Crown, and I can have both at one time," he explains, his gaze at my reflection in the glass dark and intimidating. "I can kill two birds with one stone this way. You, however, won't be able to kill the crow without killing the raven. So, I suppose that's three birds with one stone."