[Chrono Trigger Novel - Episode 12] The Day the World Ended
The people of Arris Dome conserved even the strength it took to be surprised.
When they heard that the strangers had crossed the ruins to the west, several people sat up, only to settle against the wall again. It was as though they were calculating the disappointment they would have to endure if hope proved false.
An old man named Doan received the three companions.
His coat, once white, had been patched in layer after layer. His back was bent, but his voice remained clearer than anyone else's inside the dome.
“I am descended from the director of this information center—if that title still means anything.”
Doan gestured toward a broad hall where water leaked from the ceiling. Dead terminals lined the walls, with cots and braziers filling the spaces between them.
“There is a food store underground. Some of the computers may still be alive as well. But ever since the security machines sealed the passage, no one who went below has returned.”
A child caught hold of the old man's coat.
“My daddy will come back.”
Doan could not answer.
The child's mother lowered her head. In one hand she held a metal bracelet too large for any child. There was no telling whether it was something her husband had left behind or something she meant to return when he came home.
Marle knelt before the child.
“Can you tell me where your father went?”
The child pointed to a closed door at the back of the hall.
“To find food. He said he'd come back if I waited.”
The words sounded less like faith than a promise repeated each day to keep it from collapsing.
Lucca examined the terminal beside the underground passage. When she opened its outer casing, a weak current still moved through the rusted wires.
“I can open the door. The power below isn't completely gone.”
Wariness entered Doan's face.
“You truly mean to go down there?”
“There might still be food,” Marle said.
“Those words have already sent many people below.”
Marle looked back at the child and his mother.
“Then this time, we'll come back.”
Crono walked to the door. Doan studied his cracked sword and bandages, then made no further attempt to stop him. Instead, he handed Crono a lighting device no larger than his palm.
“When the light flashes three times, the battery is finished. Come back before then. Empty-handed if you must, but alive.”
Lucca connected the wires, and the door to the lower level opened slowly.
Cold, damp air rose from below. Unlike the dusty air outside Trann Dome, it carried the mixed odors of rotting food and old disinfectant.
The stairway ended abruptly two floors down.
They used the collapsed railing to climb onto a row of pipes. Crono descended first and crouched to test the metal's strength. Lucca tied her bag to a rope and lowered it separately. Marle came last, wedging an iron bar beneath the upper door so it could not close.
“I'm making sure we still have a way back.”
She had noticed Crono watching her.
A broad chamber at the end of the passage led to the storage area.
In front of its door stood a cylindrical machine nearly twice the height of a person. Two smaller, round units hovered low at either side, and a red light swept across the three intruders in turn. When warning symbols lit on the floor, Lucca raised a hand to stop the others.
“Security system. The two smaller units are feeding power to the central body and repairing it.”
“Can you stop it?” Marle asked.
“If I get close enough to cut the cables.”
The upper casing of the central machine opened.
Yellow light gathered inside it. Crono shoved the others aside and threw himself in the opposite direction. A beam tore across the room and blackened the door behind them.
Lucca fired her launcher.
The shot dented the shell of the left-hand unit, but a slender arm extended from the central body and covered the damaged area. The metal straightened itself, and the red light came on again.
“It'll revive them every time we bring them down!”
Crono drew his sword. The cracked blade shone unsteadily beneath the emergency lights. It would never cut through the armor from the front. He watched the interval between the central machine's shots and the moments when the two support units moved closer to be repaired.
The second beam swept across the floor.
They took cover behind a fallen column. Heat reached them even through the metal. Marle spotted a loose pipe clamp by her feet and pulled it free with both hands. One end curved like a hook.
“I'll drag one in.”
“You'll have to get too close,” Lucca said.
“You said you needed to get close to cut the cable.”
Without waiting for an answer, Marle ran to the right. The central machine's red eye turned to track her. As one of the support units shifted aside to clear its line of fire, Marle hooked the clamp into a gap in its casing.
The machine's strength dragged her forward.
Her boots slipped across the floor, and the wounds in her palms split open again. Crono caught her around the waist from behind. When they dropped their weight together, the support unit tilted, exposing the cable that joined it to the central body.
Lucca's shot severed the connection.
The right-hand unit crashed to the floor. Its red light went out, and the gears inside spun uselessly.
The central machine extended a repair arm at once.
Crono charged between them. Instead of striking the armor plating, he drove his sword into the joint of the arm. He did not swing the blade. Gripping the hilt in both hands, he twisted until the metal lodged between the gears.
The mechanism bit down on the blade.
The crack in the sword lengthened.
Crono did not try to hold it. He released the hilt, leaving the repair arm locked around the weapon. Above him, light was already gathering inside the central body once more.
“Crono, get back!” Lucca shouted.
The left support unit was still active. It moved in front of the central body, opening a clear angle for the shot.
Marle picked up the clamp again. This time, instead of dragging the smaller machine, she hurled the hook into the open casing of the central one. It caught on the inner shaft where the light was gathering.
Crono seized the trailing length of pipe and pulled.
The beam fired not forward, but sharply to the left.
It pierced the remaining support unit.
Fragments from the explosion flew across the room. Lucca pulled Marle behind the fallen column, and Crono shielded his face with one arm. A piece of heated metal grazed his shoulder.
With both support units destroyed, the central machine's movements changed. The arm that had been repairing its wounds groped at empty air. Its red eye trembled erratically as it shifted from one intruder to the next.
“Now the main body!”
Saving her last round, Lucca ran in close. She thrust a tool into an open power panel beneath the central cylinder and forced two wires together. Blue sparks raced up her arm, and the jolt bent her wrist backward.
Crono caught Lucca and pulled her away.
Different mechanical whines collided inside the machine. Gears that should have stopped turned in opposite directions and shattered one another's teeth. The cylindrical body listed to one side, then struck the floor with a crushing weight.
Its final red light went dark.
For a while, none of them moved.
Lucca cradled her swelling wrist. Marle wrapped cloth around her bleeding palms. Crono pulled his sword from between the machine's arms. The crack now reached nearly to the hilt. He could not swing the blade again.
Instead of sheathing it, he wrapped it in cloth and tied it beside Lucca's bag.
“The storehouse is behind that door.”
There was no triumph in Lucca's voice.
The smell met them first when the door opened.
Marle covered her mouth and stepped back. The shelves of the vast storeroom were stacked with blackened lumps and ruptured containers. Water falling from the ceiling mixed with rotten liquid on the floor and flowed sluggishly between the aisles. The refrigeration system had failed long ago. None of the food that remained could be touched.
“It's all...”
Marle could not finish.
They searched every shelf to the end. They hoped to find even one sealed container, but the cases had decayed so badly that they crumbled beneath a finger.
At the far wall sat the remains of a man.
Clothing and skin had dried together until they were difficult to distinguish. One hand held a small pouch against his chest. The other clutched a stained piece of paper. Nothing marked him as the child's father, but there was no mistaking what he had tried to protect until the end.
Marle knelt.
Inside the pouch were a few dried seeds.
“He couldn't bring back anything to eat... but he found something that could grow.”
She cupped the seeds in both hands.
Lucca carefully unfolded the stained paper. It described how to enter a locked section of the information center, though part of the writing had been erased. What remained said that a ratlike creature wandering the dome knew the secret.
At that moment, something scraped beneath a shelf.
A small rat fled from the light. Bits of metal clung to its dry fur, and it moved with far more intelligence than the creatures they had encountered in Lab 16.
“It's been watching us,” Lucca whispered.
The three divided to block the exits. Marle deliberately rolled an empty container across the floor, and the rat turned in the opposite direction. Crono did not lunge for it. Instead, he knelt at the end of the aisle and spread out his coat. The instant the rat burrowed beneath the cloth, he drew the ends together and trapped it.
The rat struggled inside the coat, then suddenly made a hoarse sound that imitated human speech. It seemed to be saying that if they let it go, it would tell them how to open the door. When Lucca loosened the cloth a little, her face full of disbelief, the creature used one forepaw to repeat a sequence of three motions in the air.
“It knows the input sequence.”
Lucca found the matching positions on a control panel set into the wall. When Crono released the coat, the rat disappeared beneath the shelves without waiting to see whether they would honor the bargain.
The information center lay on the far side of the storeroom.
When they touched the locked terminal in the proper sequence, a section of the wall slid aside. Dozens of screens came to life at once in the darkness. A blue map hovered at the center of the room, the ruined domes connected across it like a constellation.
Lucca went to the controls, her exhaustion forgotten.
“We can search for a wave pattern like the one produced by the Gate.”
She connected the Gate Key's records to the computer. Light swept over the map, and a single point began to blink east of Arris Dome.
“Proto Dome,” Lucca read from the old display.
“There's another spatial distortion there. It might be our way home.”
Marle breathed out in relief. The hand holding the seeds against her chest loosened a little.
She leaned against the console and accidentally pressed another panel with her palm.
The map vanished.
Red letters appeared.
`A.D. 1999 — VISUAL RECORD: THE DAY OF LAVOS.`
“Lavos?”
Marle spoke the unfamiliar name aloud.
The lights in the room went out, and the central screen came alive.
At first, it showed a city. Towers pierced the sky, roads shone with light, and flying craft moved among the clouds. These were the same ruins they had just crossed, before they had fallen.
The ground shook.
People on the screen stopped where they stood. A circular fracture spread beneath the city, and red light rose with enough force to split a continent. A black shape larger than a mountain tore through the surface. Countless spines covered its back, and fire pulsed between the sections of its open shell.
When it cried out, even the recording's sound tore apart.
Columns of light climbed into the sky and fell across the world. Towers melted. Seas boiled. Clouds twisted upward, black with ash. The display moved from one city to another, but nowhere was there a place to escape.
Marle took one step back.
The pouch of seeds slipped from her hands and fell to the floor. Crono bent to pick it up, but his eyes never left the screen.
The final image showed fire covering the entire horizon and black ash settling over it.
The recording ended.
Only the low hum of the machines remained.
Lucca braced both hands against the controls. The vanished kingdom and the ruined cities were not some distant legend left by strangers. The floor beneath them and the gray sky above were the consequences of that day.
“What we just saw... was recorded three hundred years ago.”
Her voice broke.
“And from our time, it happens nine hundred and ninety-nine years in the future.”
Marle looked at the seeds in Crono's hand.
“When we saved Queen Leene, I came back.”
She chose her words carefully, without rushing them.
“Something that had already happened was changed. So this isn't over yet, either.”
Lucca looked at the blank screen.
“We don't know the cause. We don't even know what that thing is.”
“Then we'll find out.”
Marle took back the pouch of seeds. Her hands were trembling less than before.
“We saw what happens. If we pretend we didn't and go home, the people here will be left exactly as they are.”
Crono looked at the reflections of the three of them in the dark screen.
On the morning of the fair, he had entered a Gate to find one person. That choice had been as close and immediate as a hand reaching out before him. What the screen had shown them now was the death of cities and oceans and the sky itself. It was too vast to know what they could grasp first.
He took one seed from Marle and placed it on his palm.
It was small and nearly weightless.
Yet of everything they had found in the dead storeroom, it alone still held a future.
Crono returned the seed to the pouch and pointed to the marker blinking over Proto Dome in the east.
Finding a way home and learning the truth about Lavos now lay in the same direction.
For the first time, the three companions set out not toward their own age, but toward a day that had yet to come.
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