A Worm's Shoulder Devil (Youjo Senki/Worm)

New commissioned story! Enjoy.

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She’s been falling for a while. 

At first, she had been thankful for the ability she had learned in Japan’s polite, regimented society, thinking of absolutely nothing. She had honed this in the military, the early days of it at least. There was lots of waiting, and settling into a trance to let the time go by was quite useful. As she rose in the ranks, as her mind became more and more important to her work and her combat skills less and less, she used this skill less. 

But now she regrets having made use of it for so long. She had absolutely no idea how long she had been falling. 

Now, a human can lose track of time with a little bit of manipulation of their surroundings; casinos made good use of this, and one of the fundamentals of interrogation was to disrupt this knowledge in order to keep the prisoner off balance. 

Even then, this had to be stretched out over time, the estimation of time passing was initially accurate but becomes less and less accurate over time, taking days of effort in order to truly destroy this sense. 

As she is now? She could not even definitively state that she had been falling for even a single hour. She’d like to say that her memory wouldn’t be that bad, but she was well aware of the limitations of mortal minds. She was not so arrogant as to think herself above them. 

Humans have many biological indicators that can aid in telling the passage of time. They got tired, they got hungry, they got thirsty, they needed to excrete, to breathe, the passage of time could even be detected through each heartbeat, if inaccurately. 

She had none of those now. For what could be hours or eons, she had been trapped within the accursed type 95, flung into the ‘fathomless depths of space’ by Being X. Honestly, blaming her for Berun getting nuked with her in it! The nerve! The gall! She didn’t write one single thing about nuclear physics in any of her papers, how could it possibly be her fault! 

So the good news was that she’d never have to worry about the bastard again, as she now knows the worst he can do. The bad news is that she now gets to suffer his worst. 

The type 95 was always surprisingly plain; it was simply a golden disc the size of a pocket watch with a cross on the top, emulating the shape of the globus cruciger, one of the Imperial Regalia. Upon this disc sat the actual internals of the device, the ‘four cores’ in question. These internals were then further protected by a magically created artificial red diamond half-globe, diverting any outside force into the golden frame rather than anything important. 

It was functional, sure, but given that it was designed to look like jewelry, she thought they could have at least made it look fancier, instead of dull and uninspired. At least if someone decides to make an anime about her life in the future, it’ll be easy to animate. 

She didn’t think it arrogant to think that there’d be an anime made about her life. Heck, shortly before she died, there was that series where historical characters were turned into cute girls. She didn’t think they’d leave out one that was actually a cute girl. Unless they decided to turn her into a handsome man just for giggles, which would be hilarious. 

Tanya hoped that it had been at least a week, because if this is what her thoughts were reduced to, she had truly gone mad. 

Wait, what was that? It felt like… a quake? She didn’t even realize she had senses! There was nothing but blackness around her, she thought herself blind and deaf. 

…Well, she supposed that there still wasn’t proof of that, but the fact that she could feel something was…

“Yattai!” She shouted. Wait, she can talk? She tried before… or did she? Did she not even try talking to herself? She couldn’t remember. Did she never find out or did she forget she could do that. 

Still, things were looking up! If only she could see something. 

…Nothing. Well…

“Zankoku na tenshi no you ni, Shounen yo, shinwa ni nare…” She should sing to herself to pass the time. 

…Ah, she remembered singing this before! Everything’s turning around. 

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She had convinced herself that she had imagined the quake by the time the next disruption to her sensory experience occurred. A light, distant but there. 

After she had invented a new song, it was still there. It was probably real. She still ignored it, as there was nothing to be gained by looking at a single point of light. Even if it is the only hint she had that she could see. 

It took long enough for the point of light to noticeably grow that Tanya had stopped singing, having grown sick of the sound of her own voice. 

Instead, she decided to start calculating pi. She was not quite enough of a nerd to do more than memorize digits in her first life, but in officer’s school it was a mental exercise to help you juggle numbers used with your computation orb. It used an infinite series that may or may not have existed in her first life, but she did know it was far better than the one she knew then. 

It was a task done often enough that she more or less skipped through the first thirty or so numbers in the series, but it had been long enough ago that she kind of lost track at around number thirty five, so she backpedaled to thirty and started calculating in earnest. It was a lot easier than before, probably the result of having a literal calculator for a brain now. 

Unfortunately, she managed to lose her place twelve hundred sixty-one numbers in, when she noticed that the light was… a portal? It had jagged edges, like broken glass, and she barely had the time to process that before she was through, and now she was surrounded by stars. 

The space she was occupying was trembling with energy, one infused with meaning that the type 95 that functioned as her brain could somehow parse as something comprehensible. 

…it was a location. Very specific information on a place, so precise she could, if she had some way of controlling her flight, make it her next destination. But this was not an instruction, but instead a question. 

Layered in with the mingling energies was the echo of an answer to that question, an agreeing one. It too contained multitudes of data, providing even further information as to where they were going. It was a planet, one that very much resembles Earth. 

Tanya couldn’t really wrap her metaphorical head around how the type 95 was housing her consciousness, much less understand why she was able to decipher the remnants of communication between two space beings that seemed to talk by shouting solar flares at each other. 

Still, the amount of course correction she’d need to do to find their destination wasn’t that much, and she could emit sound, which should allow her to push herself a little…

One thing that she really didn’t want to realize is that there wasn’t anything actually stopping her from screaming into the void at full volume, continuously, for far longer than any human vocal cords could sustain such effort. But ever so slightly, when she read the trail of energy once more and understood more about the destination so described, she realized that she was changing course ever so slightly to reach it. 

How did it come to this? 

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It had occurred to her a bit too late that deliberately lithobraking was, in fact, creative suicide rather than anything that she should do. Not in the sense that she thought of this mere moments before impact, but in the sense that she had long since passed the point where the tiny amount of thrust she could muster could overpower the complex gravitational slingshot she had engineered with the help of the lingering trail of those mysterious space beings. 

She had a pretty firm idea of time’s passage now, although naturally she had no frame of reference to discern how long she had been falling before finding that trail. It would take another ten months for her to actually hit the planet like a tiny golden meteor. She’ll be about thirty years behind those space beings, wonder if they’re still there? 

Really, dying wouldn’t be so bad. Worst case, it’ll finally draw Being X’s attention again and she’ll get to curse him out. That sounds fun, she should start inventing new insults while she waits. Finally ending the hellish existence that Being X condemned her to would be a pretty good outcome. Best case? The type 95 is indestructible enough from Being X’s interference that she survives! 

Still, death was the most likely outcome, so she better get started on those insults. 

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Something was throwing off her calculations. She was slowing down, with no discernable cause. This was good news in theory, but why was it happening? 

Earth was in sight now. And it was Earth, although it was unlikely to be either of the ones she was familiar with. The same continents, the same oceans. It ached, somewhere deep inside, to see it with her own eyes… if she had eyes. She had figured out by now that she could only see through the ruby half-dome of the type 95, so she kind of had an eye… That she somehow translated into binocular vision. She wasn’t quite clear on the specifics. 

She spent days studying it, watching the planet rotate. The planet’s coastlines were as she remembered them, although there were a few spots that seemed to twig to her mind as wrong. Only one thing was off enough for her to know for sure that it was different in comparison than the Earth she was familiar with, and even that much only because of her familiarity with that particular part of the world: The entire island of Kyushu was gone. Well, not completely gone, but something had clearly happened to it. Some kind of gigantic sinkhole from an earthquake? She didn’t know enough seismology to really determine how possible that was. It wasn’t some kind of global warming change in sea levels, because she’d have noticed more changes if that was it. 

When she was mere minutes away from the planet, she noticed something strange: there was a giant marble statue of an angel in orbit. As heat built up around her as she hit the atmosphere, she could have swore… that it winked at her. 

The instant she passed through a cloud, she decelerated heavily. Afterwards, she was moving slowly enough that there wasn’t any discernable heat being generated from her movement, so she should be landing soon. Unfortunately, her eye had also been turned around in the process, so she couldn’t see anything but those very same clouds as she plummeted down to Earth. 

When she hit the ground, she found herself embedded within dirt, making an indent about three inches deep. Grass framed her vision, and only one thing could be seen: a grave. 

Here lies Annette Rose Hebert

Wonderful Teacher, Loving Mother

1969-2008

Hm. English, and in the 21st Century. The grave was clearly not fresh, given the grass, but it was also in very good condition; if it was any later than 2018 she’d be shocked. 

Now, it was time to wait. 

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She had expected her first human contact in far too long would be one of the graveyard’s workers, noticing the damage while performing maintenance and finding the type 95 embedded in the soil. Failing that, some other mourner who she could yell out to. 

Whether by the hand of Being X (doubtful) or by random chance, she had to wait one night and half a day before she heard traces of even one person. She didn’t notice them immediately, but then Tanya saw a shadow obscure the grave, and could faintly hear crying. 

…Oh. She can’t hear anything that’s not practically on top of her due to all of the dirt. Her metaphorical ears are plugged. “Excuse me.” Tanya said as gently as possible. With no response, she repeated it, louder. “Excuse me!”

The crying stopped. “...Who’s there?” The voice was a girl’s, and was faint, but clearly tinged with fear. 

Speaking loudly but evenly, Tanya continued. “Would you be the child of Mrs. Hebert, here?”

There was a pause. “...Yes.” She said, apparently deciding that there wasn’t much reason for that information to be unsafe to reveal. 

“Good, good.” Tanya said, “I would love to ask about your health, but first I must be a bit selfish: I’m buried a bit in front of your mother’s grave, so if you could help pry me out, I’ll be your best friend.” A bit transparently manipulative, because bluntly in such a relationship the girl would have most of the power, but by phrasing it in such a way, she could immediately engender some amount of trust, which can be built on as she went. 

“...Really?” The girl asked, and now she felt bad at how much hope was in that word. 

“Really.” Tanya said with conviction. 

The girl took a moment to find the indent in the dirt among the grass, it was apparently less than obvious at a glance, but Tanya guided her into sticking her fingers down into the dirt and pulling Tanya out of it.

Her new best friend, such as it is, was a teenage girl; about the same age as Visha was on those first days in the Rhine, about sixteen if she had to guess. Maybe a bit younger? She was tall, but also very slim. She had curly dark hair that was tended well; Princess Hildebrand herself would likely compliment it. She wore glasses, and she seemed fascinated at the type 95’s deceptively simple appearance. 

“Thank you!” Tanya said, as earnestly as she could. The girl startled, dropping the type 95 back into the grass, face down. “Please pick me back up.” She said, trying and failing to leave the annoyance out of her voice. 

“S-sorry.” The girl said, picking the type 95 back off the ground and looking at it some more. 

“Thank you.” Tanya repeated, rhetorically resetting the conversation. “My name is Tanya, what’s yours?” She had considered going by Tenko again, but she didn’t want to risk any potential ethnic tension with her new friend. Besides, she had long since accepted that name as her own. 

The girl’s eyes widened, anxiety clear on her face. “Oh, right! I’m Taylor.” 

“It’s great to meet you, Taylor.” Tanya finished politely. “Now, I do have lots of questions, but first there’s a more pressing concern: You.” From how Taylor was tearing up already, Tanya got the impression that she had the same amount of friends that Tanya did: none. Well, one, now. “Tell me your troubles. I’m all ears.”

As Tanya had expected, this took a while. 

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“I’m not sure if I can face her again.” Taylor whispered, laying down on her mother’s gravesite and talking to Tanya, who was dangling from the type 95’s somehow-intact chain on the grave in question. “Summer’s almost over, and Emma’ll probably go right back to it.”

Truly, this Emma was cruel, to make someone fear school so. Being denied an education is one of the worst fates that can be inflicted on someone, in her opinion. Not even Being X sunk that low. 

…Okay, that was a bit overdramatic, but still… “It’s definitely a conundrum.” Tanya said finally. “Not attending school isn’t a viable option, of course.”

“That just means Emma wins.” Taylor said firmly, agreeing. 

“Still, I’m baffled as to what may have occurred.” Tanya continued, “Closest thing I’ve seen to that was when that asshole decided to find religion.” Damned Schugel… Curse you, Being X. “He had gone completely insane with fanaticism.”

Sharing a small personal detail successfully got Taylor to focus away from her problems. “So how long have you been a necklace?” She asked. 

“I lost track of time.” Tanya replied honestly. “You are, however, the first person I’ve had the chance to speak to since it happened. So in that sense, not very long.”

“So you used to not be a necklace?” Taylor asked, wiping her tears. 

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“I died.” Tanya replied bluntly. 

“So you’re a ghost?” Taylor asked, sitting up finally. 

Wait, is she a ghost? “...I guess I am.” Tanya said after a moment of thinking about it. “I have some questions.”

“Shoot.”

First thing’s first. “What year is it?” Tanya asked. 

“2010.” Taylor said crisply, like she was answering a teacher. “It’s August, if it matters.” She added, a slight smile on her face. 

Okay, so definitely not her first Earth. “What country is this?” She asked. This was probably America… “The full name, if you please.”

“The United States of America.” 

That eliminates her second Earth. Quite efficient. “As I thought.” Tanya said instead. “Now, the next most pressing issue would be related to your schedule. Are you expected anywhere?”

Taylor’s eyes widened, looking up at the sun. “Uh… I need to be home at six?” She said hesitantly. “To cook dinner?” Reasonable. Fifteen was definitely old enough to be given such responsibility regularly. 

“Well I don’t know about you, but I learned to tell time by the sun’s position, and with the month known, you have maybe an hour and a half.” Tanya pointed out. 

Taylor took the type 95 and slipped the necklace on before running towards the graveyard’s exit. There was a bus stop down the road. 

Tanya didn’t pay very much attention though. Instead, she marveled at the flood of sensations that occurred when Taylor put the type 95 around her neck. She could feel herself move as Taylor did, her eyes migrated to Taylor’s perception, she could suddenly smell again. “That’s new…” Tanya thought to herself. 

“Wait, Tanya?” Taylor replied, “How are you doing that?” Oddly, Tanya couldn’t feel Taylor’s mouth move as she spoke. 

“Apologies, Taylor. As I said, being a ghost is still rather new to me.” Tanya immediately ran damage control. “Apparently, I can speak into your mind when you wear the type 95.”

“Odd name for a necklace.” Taylor thought back suspiciously. 

“It’s not just a necklace.” Tanya elaborated, “I wouldn’t wear something like this if it wasn’t useful.” Well, she was ordered to use it…

“So it’s tinkertech?” Taylor thought, “Well, it can trap a ghost, so I guess it would have to be…”

What the heck is tinkertech?