FicWad

When Sidoh reached the end of the hall, he found himself in the grandest, most impressive chamber he’d ever seen. The floor, the walls, the ceiling, the pillars…everything looked like it was made of pure gold. The room shone and glittered from every surface- Sidoh imagined that this was what it was like to be inside the sun. There was an equally grand and gold-plated throne near the end of the chamber, and Sidoh almost ran back through the hallway and out the door when he saw who was seated on it…a large, blue shinigami with red eyes and horns, holding a large ornate scythe…
“Who are you?” asked Daril Ghiroza.
“I am the King.”
“No you’re not!” said Kinddara, pointing behind her. “The King’s out there.”
“I control the golden puppet outside the tower. Only in rare and dire circumstances do I show my true self.”
If the King was showing himself to them, and announcing he was the King…that couldn’t be good, could it? They were doomed. Sidoh was sure of it.
“That’s the King all right, Kinddara. I’d know his voice anywhere. Just a puppet, eh? I never would have guessed,” said Daril. “So, you’re the real King...to what do I owe the honour?”
“Tell me, all of you…what do you know about Rem? Kinddara?”
“If Rem was a human, I woulda killed him, but I don’t remember no humans named Rem. I don’t know no shinigami named Rem, neither,” said Kinddara.
“Sidoh?”
“Uh…um,” Sidoh stammered. “Rem…who?”
“Daril?”
“I can put the face of a shinigami to that name, but I didn’t know her well at all. Rumour has it she died in the human world a few years ago.”
“Anything else?”
“…Well, there’s also this crackpot rumour going around that she’s alive, you held her prisoner for years, she escaped, and now you’re going to kill everyone…but to me, that just sounds like Ryuk trying to stir up trouble. It’s not true, is it?”
“Of course not, young one. The thought of harm befalling any one of you makes me positively ill.”
Daril smiled. “That settles it, then. I’ll believe the King over Ryuk any day.”
“Why, thank you, dear. I’m touched,” said the King.
“Don’t take it too personally, Great King. It’s Ryuk, for God’s sake. He’s nothing but a lying notebook thief-you’d have to be an idiot to believe half the stuff he says. So, why have you been pretending to be a large golden puppet for all these centuries?”
“That’s a long story I’ll explain to you when we have time, but right now, we have urgent business to attend to. You say Ryuk is the one who started this rumour?”
“Yes.”
“Well, Ryuk’s story has element of truth to it. Rem is, indeed, alive...”
Where was the King going with this, Sidoh wondered? Was he going to let them live, or was he building up to the point where they got slaughtered?
“And I did keep her locked up in this tower for many years, because she is the most dangerous shinigami this realm has ever seen. Her crime is both horrific and unforgivable…she has killed another shinigami; a piteous, wretched thirteen by the name of Gelus.”
Daril and Sidoh were silent with shock, but Kinddara’s fierce grin only got wider.
“How? How?” she asked eagerly.
“I suspect she may have gotten hold of one of the King’s Weapons without my knowledge, which only makes her more of a danger to every shinigami in this realm…she is as cunning as she is depraved. After she slaughtered poor Gelus, she fled to the human world and managed to vanish for a while before I found her and brought her back to my tower. Killing another shinigami warrants an extreme level punishment, and I should have administered justice to her right then and there…but I failed you all. Out of curiosity, I merely kept her restrained, trying to convince her to tell me how she had killed Gelus-if she had stolen a King’s Weapon, and if she had, how she had done so…but before I could persuade her to tell me, she escaped, to my utmost horror. Now, she is free somewhere in the shinigami realm, living amongst all my poor, innocent, unsuspecting little ones, and I have no doubt that she will kill again…” the King sighed sorrowfully, his voice catching as he spoke. “That is why I summoned each of you here. I require assistance from the three of you to find her…Sidoh’s assistance, in particular.”
Sidoh had been trying to make sense of this new version of events he had just been told, and the King’s statement took him by surprise. “W-what? Me?” he asked incredulously. “What can I do? I’m just some low-ranking shinigami who…”
“Low-ranking? What makes you think so, Sidoh?”
“Well…it’s kind of obvious,” Sidoh muttered self-consciously. “I mean, everyone says so…I’m…well, I’m…you know.”
“What do I know, Sidoh?”
Sidoh hung his head in shame as he reluctantly admitted, “I’m…well, I’m…uh…not too bright, I guess.”
“Intelligence isn’t everything, Sidoh. You are an eight, and that’s near the middle of the ranking scale, but with every rank you go down, the more shinigami are assigned to it…there is only one 1, and only one 2, but there are about ten 3s, and about thirty fours…going down the scale, and keeping your ranking in mind, you are actually higher-ranked than more than three-fifths of the shinigami in this realm. I wouldn’t call that low.”
“What!?” Sidoh squawked. After all these centuries of shinigami calling him a moron and a weenie, of being bossed around by almost everyone in the realm…he actually outranked more than half of them?
“Exceptional intelligence helps tremendously in attaining a high rank, but it isn’t the only factor I look at. Do you remember the things I occasionally made all of you do, other than write in your notebooks and learn the rules of the realm?”
Yes, Sidoh remembered…every once in a while, the King used to make them do odd things like identify letters hung from the top of the tower that got increasingly smaller, or fly or run from one point to the another…that had been fun. Sidoh had always finished first, and the first time, he had waited gleefully at the end for the others to catch up so he could gloat over his victory…for a few seconds, anyway, until Deridovely called him a retard and snarled at him to shut the hell up. Sidoh still always finished first after that, but he never said anything about it again.
“They were tests for things other than just intelligence, and Sidoh, my boy, what you lack in that area, you make up for in many others…I’m not trying to flatter you with what I’m about to say. I don’t need to, because the facts speak for themselves. Sidoh, you are the fastest shinigami in this entire realm, both on foot and in the air, and you also posses incredible stamina and coordination. Your hearing is twice as good as the average, but it’s still nothing compared to your eyesight…you are one of the few in thousands upon thousands of shinigami who can see a shinigami’s footprint.”
“Holy Crap! You can see shinigami footprints, Sidoh?” Daril said in amazement.
“You can’t?” said Sidoh, equally amazed.
“Shinigami are nearly weightless, and if they do happen to be walking in soft material, their footprints are mere micrometers deep. She can’t see them, I can’t see them…no one in this realm but you can see them, Sidoh. You have what’s called supersensory perception, and in your case, it has manifested itself in eyesight hundreds of times more powerful than average…this, combined with all your other talents, makes you a natural-born tracker.”
“Tracker…,” Daril muttered as she realized what the King was getting at.
“Daril Ghiroza is also fast and very agile, in addition to being the third most intelligent shinigami in the realm. Therefore, I am appointing her the leader of this group-my group of elite trackers. I need you to find Rem, and bring her back, before she can harm anyone else. That’s where Kinddara comes in-if Rem is unwilling to come with you, I’m sure Kinddara will be able to pose enough of a threat to convince her otherwise. But before you leave, there are a few things I must do…I need to teach the three of you how to bring Rem down if she becomes violent, and I have to teach Daril everything I know about tracking, so you can still find her even if Sidoh doesn’t locate any footprints. But before that…is there anything you’d like to tell me, Sidoh?”
Sidoh felt as though his innards had suddenly disappeared, only to be replaced with a large number of squirming things. “Uh…um…I…I…I don’t know what you mean, Great King?”
“Are you sure, Sidoh? You aren’t hiding anything from me, are you?”
“N-n-n-oooo…”
The King sat further back in his chair. “Hmmm,” he sighed. “Is that so? Tell me, Sidoh…before I called you here, I tried to find Rem myself, so I wouldn’t have to involve any of my little ones unless absolutely necessary; and I remember seeing you…did you manage to find some chocolate after I left?”
“Chocolate?” Sidoh said, confused.
“Yes. Ryuk told me that without chocolate, you exhibit obvious withdrawal symptoms. You seem to be fairly normal right now, so I assume you managed to procure some chocolate, correct?”
“Uh…yes. For my symptoms…I got chocolate. Yeah.”
“Really? I find that rather curious, seeing as how chocolate contains no monosaccharide fructose, and therefore is not physically addictive, and won’t produce physical withdrawal symptoms in a shinigami that consumes it.”
Sidoh felt his heart stop, his vision spun; he hoped desperately that he’d pass out and stay unconscious while the King killed him…
“Normally, Sidoh, I’d have to punish you severely for lying to the King, but right now, I need you…and I have a feeling you wouldn’t be lying to me if you weren’t desperately afraid, which I can’t blame you for. I had my suspicions, as soon as Ryuk told me the lie about the chocolate, that the five of you knew something about Rem...that you may have even had the misfortune of running into her. She may have concocted a horrible story about me, or simply threatened you so that you’d be too afraid to come to me, and she’d remain free to kill…but you can tell me everything, Sidoh. You’re safe now; she can’t harm you while you’re under my care. Anything you may have done up to this point will be absolved by telling me what you know. Please…I’m listening.”
So the jig was up…Sidoh didn’t have a choice. It seemed that he could either cooperate with the King, or die…it was like Deridovely had said. Going against the King was pointless. It would only make his own death come sooner…at the cost of the deaths of his friends…Gukku, Deridovely, Zellogi…wait.
Why did Sidoh consider them friends, he wondered? All his life, they’d done nothing but mock him and insult him. If he was back by Justin’s throne, and they were here in his place, would they refuse to help the King, just so he’d be safe? Somehow, he didn’t think so. There was no way he could stay alive and protect everyone at the same time…Sidoh couldn’t come up with plausible lies off the top of his head like Ryuk could…and he desperately didn’t want to die. And who knew…maybe the King was telling the truth, after all. Maybe Rem wasn’t as innocent as she seemed; maybe it was a good idea to help the King…
“Promise you won’t get mad?” he said.
“Promise,” said the King.