Title: Thirteen O'Clock
Author: samuraiter
Fandom: Disgaea: Hour of Darkness
Rating: R
Length: 2,775
Pairing: N / A
Content Notes: This is a Disgaea 'fic, but done in the style of Corpse Party, so ... deaths and scares, going for a creepy atmosphere. Not very Disgaea-y, but there it is.
Spoiler Info: There are no spoilers in this story.
Author Notes: Posted for Amnesty 3. All characters here are technically OCs representing different classes in the game. Attempted to do this in one hour or less, but got a little carried away, and it ended up three times the planned size.
Summary: Not everybody who goes into the Item World returns.

Navigation of the interstices – the spaces separating reality from the dimensions inside the artifacts – had its perils, and the science of exploring those spaces had its faults. 99% of all expeditions, according to the statisticians, managed to get from Point A in reality to Point B inside one of the artifacts, but 1% of them ... disappeared, and no one had solved the mystery of those disappearances, assuming that a party might be subject to a range of fates. Mutiny seemed to be the favorite. Why not use the Item World – and, by extension, its instability – as a key opportunity for assassination?

Lisanne – a Cleric, descended from Angels like all in her profession – had considered the possibility as soon as she realized that she and her party had become the 1%. Etna had asked her to subjugate the interior of a unique amulet that she had acquired from a set of ruins that she and her elites had excavated in the depths of a nameless forest that had drifted into the Graveyards. It had seemed like a normal object, but there had been a ... disturbance, as if a spell had been cast upon it, and the party had been stranded, unable to access either its supplies or a link back to the castle.

By her estimation, they had been inside the amulet for ninety-six hours – four entire days. Despite her training, she had no information on the effects of prolonged exposure to the other dimension. All research suggested that each artifact – each dimension – existed in a state of thirteen o'clock, the seconds and minutes only passing if one chose to perceive them as passing. The sourceless light of the place never changed its intensity, and every mass of land they encountered hovered in perfect stasis, as silent and unchanging as the grave. The party itself seemed to be the only sign of life.

She had been able to maintain discipline for twenty-four hours, since there had been records of at least one party spending a complete day in the Item World in the past. After that, order had started to fray at the edges. Roberto, a Zombie she had employed as a porter, had started ignoring her orders, disappearing into a fissure as if a voice had called to him from inside it. He might have perished there, but she discounted the idea, and none of her subordinates offered to search for him. Zombies had the same fate as Prinnies in that their overseers considered them expendables, perhaps to a fault.

Another twenty-four hours passed, and her Man-Eater, Theodore, rooted himself to the spot as soon as he discovered a small grove of trees – bare, perhaps dead to the roots, but still trees – in the midst of the wastes. He had offered no explanations, simply closing his eyes and settling in one place, looking like nothing more than a stump, and all attempts to budge him failed. She rationalized it by recalling a number of incidents involving others like him, stating that his behavior had precedent, but both she and the others thought it ominous that he had made his decision as abruptly as he had.

Another twenty-four hours, and the dimension continued in its state of thirteen o'clock, its state of emptiness. The party had not encountered anything but the inanimate objects that one noticed in every dimension like the one inside the amulet, and there did not seem to be any Gates connecting one region to another. Instead, there only seemed to be one region stretching in all directions, unrestrained by any logic. Percival, a Hobbit attached to the party as a front-line combatant, started acting erratically, refusing to speak and avoiding the others before jumping into a deep ravine.

At the four-day mark, Lisanne had come to expect that one of the others – including herself, six remained – might try to supplant her by killing her, as frequently happened in any organization controlled by Demons, but none of them had made a move, perhaps realizing that her magic might be able to sustain them as their journey stretched for day after day. She did not feel either hunger or thirst, thanks to the timelessness of the Item World, but she had also read that those sensations – sublimated, but not eliminated – had a tendency to spring up if ignored.

Ninety-eight hours. Kilroy and Quinoa – her Scout and her Rogue – decided to dissent and separate from the party, hoping that their abilities might allow them to succeed at finding the exit – any exit – from the other dimension. They made for a particularly large mass of land floating above the base camp that the party had made at the four-day mark, and Lisanne had decided to let them go, but, as she encouraged the others to strike camp, one of them, Vanity, one of her two Warriors, instead offered to go after them. That had occurred at ninety-nine hours, and she, too, had not returned.

One hundred hours. Four days and four hours. Only three remaining in the party, including Lisanne herself. No end in sight to the other dimension, only one mass of land after another. The other Warrior, Rufus, stopped in his tracks, professing concern for the three who had departed one hour ago. So did Amietta, the Brawler. Dissent again. Lisanne, happy that they had decided simply to not agree to her orders, rather than kill her outright, let them both go, offering them the use of the map that she had been making in order to help them back to the former base camp and its environs.

After that, Lisanne stopped counting the hours. It had come to seem pointless in light of the fact that the constant state of thirteen o'clock had acquired a relentless quality. Logic dictated that, after a certain point, she ought to go and search for the others, ought to reunite the party to the best of her ability, but, as soon as that idea presented itself, her logic derailed, stating instead that self-preservation had priority, since she had failed the others and might be killed by them if she found them again. Then, hunger and thirst asserted themselves in her consciousness, clawing at her insides as if alive.

She reached a bridge that had been cobbled together from bits of debris that had accumulated in the other dimension. She had stopped trying to track her location after giving her map to the others, but she had a sense that she come around a complete circle, and that the bridge had not been there on her first passage. It terminated in ... a castle? Or, at least, a gathering of stones that approximated a castle, different from any other mass that the party had encountered up to that point. Had it drifted upwards from another point in the same dimension? Or had she simply not noticed it before?

The halls had no reason to them, seeming to be a maze of false starts and dead ends. Good sense might once have suggested that she avoid the castle entirely, suspecting a trap, but the same consumptions that rasped at the edges of her sanity, demanding sustenance in a place that offered none, motivated her to ignore the risks and enter the place despite them. She thought to recall the location of the entrance, but, as soon as she passed through it, it seemed to disappear from sight, and her attempts to rediscover it failed. She realized that she ought to have heeded her suspicions.

Then, in a hall of the castle that seemed almost as large as that of the castle she had once inhabited in reality, she noticed a movement at the edge of her vision. Roberto. He stood against one of the walls, his hands twitching – lifeless, as he had always been, but his tissues seemed dry almost to the point of full mummification, as if he had been animated, but never maintained, stuck in a state that Zombies only achieved after years of neglect. His blank eyes stared up into space, and his jaws opened a fraction of one inch as soon as she drew close, but he made no other movements.

Unable to move, she thought, stuck at thirteen o'clock like all other things in this place. Then, she followed the direction of his gaze, and she noticed a series of roots creeping down the walls. One of them grasped a small orb, the color of silver, a reserve of magic employed by a number of Demons, and she realized from the runes on its surface that it belonged to Theodore, but the complexity of the roots above her head, each as dry as poor Roberto, suggested a Man-Eater that had long ago abandoned the spark of independent life and returned to century after century of a tree-like existence.

Another root trailed down a series of corridors leading from the hall into the depths of the castle, and she used her fingers to trace it as it tapered into the darkness. She had to use a little of her magic to inspire light from her staff as soon as it became too black to see, and the radiance showed her that the root concluded in a pile of bleached bones – small and stunted, as if belonging to a deformed child. Or a Hobbit. Percival. And no sign of anything that had killed him. It almost seemed that the root, sensing moisture, had used him for nourishment, but only after he had died.

The corridors became a network of caves, and Lisanne extended the light of her staff as far as it could reach as she made her way downwards. Hunger and thirst subsided in favor of a cold feeling in the pit of her stomach, and she had the sense that – aside from the inanimate Roberto – she had ceased to be alone. The walls around her radiated a strange heat, and the smell of death – not of a Zombie, dead and all but pickled, but of death immediate and visceral – assaulted her nostrils. Instinct told her that she had come into the presence of a thing that had killing on its mind.

A Ghost? It certainly seemed to be, hovering as it did at the edge of the light. Ghosts manifested in every place in reality, and their numbers had reached points that almost forced a number of them to spill into the Item World. She counted them among her companions in the army of the Overlord, but ... the Ghost at the heart of the caves seemed different. Its eyeless gaze had a deep and unsettling intensity to it, and it purposely pulled back if she tried to expand her light, avoiding her attention, but not departing. Ghosts normally had a calm aimless to them. This one did not.

"I am not going to harm you," she said, the echoing of her voice eerie in the darkness. It retreated, as if beckoning to her to follow it, and follow she did. She did not let it out of her sight, and, because of that, she almost did not notice the floor changing under her feet as she advanced ... until her toe nudged a soft object, and she realized that the stone of the caves had stopped, giving way to a mass of corpses, almost too many to count. She had seen dead before. For her Overlord, she had killed before. And yet the sight of the bodies, the Ghost settling atop them, unnerved her to the core.

Kilroy. Quinoa. Vanity. Rufus. Amietta. She recognized them from their gear, and from the fact that their bodies had come to rest on top of the pile, surrounding the Ghost like discarded toys. Of Kilroy, Quinoa, and Vanity, only bones remained, but Rufus and Amietta seemed uncomfortably recent in their demise, already starting to decay, but still recognizable. The Ghost no longer avoided the light, focusing its gaze on Lisanne, its featureless face – featureless save for the blank spots that seemed as its eyes – tracking her every movement. Not like a mere Ghost, but like a predator.

Lisanne thought back to all the theory she had read on the subject of the Item World. One of the researchers had suggested that the interstices might be fluid, that they might act as nets to catch detritus from not only the other dimensions, but from reality, forming a pocket that might seem like the Item World, but that served as a black hole, catching and holding bits and pieces. That same theory suggested that there might be no exit from such a place, that it ought not to exist, but that there existed a chance that anybody heading to another dimension might be caught up there instead.

A true thirteen o'clock, she thought, a true hour outside of time, lost to all perception. The Ghost before her may have been there for ages, insane from the timelessness of the place, transforming from the idle dead into a thing that preyed upon any that entered its domain, biding the days until its guests fell victim to their own paranoia and became isolated, easy for it to lure and catch. It had easily used the suspicions of her party to divide it up and devour it, one person at a time. And only she remained, alone against a thing that had been accruing supernatural strength for eons.

"This is my failing," she said, raising her staff and recalling all of the magic – all of it for healing and support, none of it for offense – that she had at her disposal, "for thinking like a Demon at a time that required non-Demonic thought." The Ghost started to advance upon her, and she glanced at the corpses at her feet, focusing on the faces that seemed whole enough to still be familiar. "Rufus. Amietta. Please forgive me." Then, she closed her eyes and banished her light, seeking the familiar peace of her magic and the life it represented. "Etna. Overlord Laharl. I am sorry."

She focused all of her mana, using it to raise a shield around her body and then reinforcing it from her reserves, but the Ghost ignored it, and she backed up until she felt the stone of a wall behind her. A tendril of coldness – the essence of the Ghost, reshaped into a weapon – poked at the shield, cracking it open and not hesitating to snake through it. She raised her hands, raised her staff, but it dodged around them, finding her mouth and forcing itself down into her throat, seeming to blossom into a variety of new and different shapes as it spread through the inside of her body.

It easily lifted her off the ground, and her staff dropped from fingers that had abruptly lost all sensation. She almost felt as if she stepped outside her body, observing the Ghost as it drained everything from her, first her mana, then all of the magic inate to her being, then her very life force, then every drop of fluid in each tissue of her body ... until nothing remained but a husk. Only then did it drop her, casting her aside like garbage. She became aware, as she stared up at the ceiling, that she lay next to the corpse that had been Rufus. But how had she not died? The Ghost had certainly killed her.

Then, at the edge of her field of vision, motes of light appeared, and she realized that she had ceased to be alone. Thirteen o'clock, she thought, a black hole. She then realized that a number of the indistinct faces that stared back at her seemed ... familiar. Her subordinates. Her companions. No escape, neither for the living – A realization spread through her awareness, and panic started to rise up in her soul. – nor the dead. No escape. No reincarnation. No afterlife. ... Nothing at all. And the dead all looked back at her, eyes full of nothing. Hopelessness, perhaps. Or less than that.

Etna sent a second party into the amulet to determine the fate of the first, but it seemed as though the first party had never arrived at all, and subjugating the entire dimension revealed nothing of their fate. That obliged her to report Lisanne and the others to Overlord Laharl as missing, presumed gone for good. He snarled at the waste of resources, grumbled at the inconvenience, but Demons rebelled and mutinied for many reasons, and a high level of loss had to be expected. As long as 99% of all expeditions returned from the Item World, the 1% claimed by thirteen o'clock went unnoticed.

END.