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DATE:???, the 50th year after the Coronation
LOCATION: Concord Metropolis?
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When I opened my eyes, concrete and weathered wood greeted me—walls stained with oil and age, beams overhead sagging from decades of neglect. The air smelled like rust and sawdust.
Hmmmm, not exactly a few seconds like last time.
My wrists were cuffed behind my back. Metal bit into skin, tight enough to restrict circulation.
I glanced around, cataloging. The workshop. Tables lined with half-assembled mechanisms, tools hanging on hooks, scattered bolts and screws catching dim light from a single barred window.
Zilliam had dragged me here after I knocked myself out. Smart move on that. Isolated, contained, no witnesses. But why not just kill me? She wasn't the kind to spare a presumed killer.
The handcuffs were standard Unified Kingdom issue—double-locking mechanism, hardened steel, designed to hold people with enhanced strength. For most, they were an inconvenience. For me, they were even less.
It had been years since I'd done this trick, but some skills don't fade.
I rotated my wrists inward, feeling the bones strain against unnatural angles. Then I twisted hard—sharp, controlled—and felt both wrists snap cleanly. The pain was immediate but distant, like hearing news from another country. Same trick I used in the Southern Desert. Still works.
I slipped my hands free, the cuffs clattering to the floor.
Then came the realignment. I pressed each wrist against my knee, applying pressure until the bones clicked back into place. Cartilage shifted. Tendons protested. I flexed my fingers—stiff, but functional.
Normally this would traumatize someone. Shock, screaming, maybe passing out. For me? I wasn't sure why I didn't feel pain. Usually I do in dreams. Was it because I was supposed to be someone else? Who the hell even is Blois? Did he retire by the time I came to this place?
Too bad Emily isn't here to ask her. Huh.
I forgot about her. I should contact the Legion about that Crater guy. Teleportation would certainly be useful.
But anyway, Zilliam had been sloppy. She'd underestimated what I could do, or better said what I was willing to do. Perhaps I should've asked her to do something more useful than just peek into my head. Did she even do what I asked? I wonder…
Should I find the circuit laboratory? Drive her insane again by showing her what her future self would become? The thought amused me.
Then another memory surfaced—Pamela's husband finding the secret entrance. That discovery had been the first domino in a long chain that ended with Zilliam's… death? I'm not really sure what happened to her. I mostly destroyed her body and she doesn't have my regeneration so she couldn't possibly be alive… right? Or at least not recovered. That was for certain.
I should punish her for cuffing me.
Seeing her go insane in real-time through this dream's logic? That would be entertaining.
Yeah. Why not?
I crossed the workshop to the delivery door—a heavy metal shutter designed for moving large equipment. I grabbed the handle and pulled. Nothing. Right. Rusted shut from years of disuse.
Last time I'd been here, Alice had used her telekinesis to help lift it. I didn't have that luxury now.
Didn't matter. I wasn't bound by caution anymore. It wasn't like I had to preserve the mechanism nor be quiet.
I pressed my back flat against the wall, using it for support. Then I positioned myself at an angle, drew my leg back, and kicked. Hard. Using all the leverage my height and stance provided.
The first kick echoed like a gunshot. Metal groaned but held.
Second kick. A dent appeared.
Third. The frame shifted slightly. Bolts rattled in their housings.
Fourth kick—something inside the mechanism snapped with a satisfying crack. Gears engaged. The door began to rise on its own, grinding upward inch by inch, spilling darkness from the tunnel beyond.
I waited, watching the black mouth of the entrance yawn open fully.
Then I stopped.
No point going down there. The key to the deeper sections was still in the library, hidden in that bookshelf.
I turned away from the tunnel, leaving the door open behind me—a gaping wound in the workshop's side, spilling cold air and shadow.
Time to find Zilliam and see what her little mind-dive had cost her.
The courtyard outside was chaos incarnate. The sky wasn't black, not night, but like a great shadow draped across the hemisphere. I squinted, caught slender lines of texture—was it a massive hand? Some monstrous claw? The thing that haunted me?
The air was thick with the copper scent of blood—drenched, soaked through every breath.
Blood stained the ground in wide, jagged patches—the scars of battle, half-eaten corpses sprawled in decay, reminders of forgotten fights.
How long had I been down? Hours?
But the bigger question gnawed at me—was this a memory? I don't think so…
As I passed the ruined academy courtyard, a flicker caught my eye just inside the entrance—an unnatural tremor in the air, shifting, impossible.
At first, my brain blamed the poor light, a trick of dusk or storm. Then it stepped forward from the black—hulking, terrible. Movement carved from nightmare.
It was a grotesque mockery of a human—the skeletal frame stretched like a childling grown too fast, limbs swinging with jerky, unnatural motions. Thick, coarse black fur clung to parts of its pale, taut skin, its feet ending in wicked claws, scraping harshly on the concrete.
Then its face—an extended skull, grotesquely elongated, with four amber eyes glowing like cold flames. The mouth hung open way beyond reason, teeth jagged and broken, breath drifting as the stench of rust and rot.
Shadows clung to it. Darkness swirled, alive and crawling across the creature's form.
It passed beneath the flickering streetlights, assimilating their glow, swallowing the light whole.
Then, it vanished inside the building.
The courtyard's temperature snapped back. Lights flickered on again.
Screams followed, raw and sharp.
In the distance, movement caught my eye—a fight unfolding near the eastern courtyard.
I moved closer, curious.
Another of those creatures. Taller than the first by maybe a foot, its proportions slightly different—more hunched, arms longer, dragging claws that carved furrows in the concrete. It faced off against two heroes working in tandem.
Blazer and Surge.
The timeline made no sense. In the fiftieth year after the coronation, heroes should have only just appeared publicly. Experimental programs, underground trials. How were they this organized already? This coordinated?
Was the whole reveal a sham? Had they existed for decades longer than anyone admitted?
Questions for later. Or for never. I had too much on my mind already.
I'd never seen them fight before. Worth watching.
Blazer struck first—a blur of motion, fists driving forward with accumulated momentum, each punch building speed and force from the last. His specialty. Every hit faster, harder, compounding velocity until his hands became weapons that could shatter steel.
He drove a dozen strikes into the creature's torso in the span of three seconds. I could hear the impacts from fifty meters away—thunderous cracks, bone meeting something harder than bone.
The creature didn't stagger.
Didn't even flinch.
It swung one grotesque arm in a lazy arc. Blazer ducked, rolled back, repositioned. His costume—red and gold, garish even in this nightmare—was already torn at the shoulder. Blood seeped through.
Surge moved in from the flank, hands crackling with green energy. Electricity? No—something else. Bio-energy, maybe.
He thrust both palms forward, releasing a concentrated burst. The green wave hit the creature center-mass, bright and violent. For a moment, the thing's outline wavered, shadows peeling back from the light.
It slid backward maybe two meters, claws digging trenches in the ground.
Then it stopped.
The light faded.
It stood there, unharmed.
Blazer came in again—this time aiming for the legs, trying to compromise mobility. A spinning kick, momentum-enhanced, fast enough that the air screamed. His boot connected with the creature's knee joint.
The crack was audible.
The creature's leg bent wrong—backward, hyperextended.
It didn't fall.
Instead, it reached down with one massive hand and grabbed Blazer by the ankle mid-retreat. Lifted him like a child holding a doll.
Surge fired another burst—desperation in the timing. The green energy splashed across the creature's face, forcing it to turn its four amber eyes away from the brightness.
It hurled Blazer.
The hero's body tumbled through the air, crashing into a pile of rubble thirty meters back. He didn't get up immediately.
Surge stepped between them, hands raised, energy crackling brighter now—pulling from deeper reserves. His face was pale, sweat streaming despite the cold. An old man fighting something that shouldn't exist.
The creature advanced. Slow. chaotic. Each step ragged, claws scraping, joints bending wrong.
That slowness was the only thing keeping them alive.
For something that tanked hits like that—Blazer's momentum-enhanced strikes, Surge's bio-energy blasts—it should have killed them both already. But it moved like it was wading through water, every motion delayed by a fraction of a second.
Was it playing with them?
Surge released another barrage—three quick pulses, trying to keep distance. The creature batted the first aside with one clawed hand, absorbed the second into its chest without reaction, then walked straight through the third.
It reached for him.
Blazer was back on his feet, limping but mobile, winding up for another strike.
The fight would continue. They'd wear themselves out. Maybe survive if they got lucky and the thing got bored first.
I stopped watching.
Their struggle didn't entertain me. Two heroes barely holding their own against one creature while dozens more prowled the campus. The outcome was inevitable—just a question of timing.
I had my own objective.
Zilliam.
She must have been injured when she peered into my mind and saw that thing. Psychic backlash, mental fracture, something. The infirmary was the logical place to look—assuming she didn't die on the spot. Who else would have moved me unharmed to the workshop?
I turned away from the fight, leaving Blazer and Surge to their futile dance, and headed toward where the medical wing should be.
Behind me, another scream cut through the air, followed by the wet sound of impact.
I didn't look back.
The medical wing was a maze of labs—rows of sterile rooms dedicated to research I'd never cared enough to investigate. Only a small section at the end was reserved for actual healing.
The infirmary walls were painted in blood. Entrails draped across counters and smeared along the plaster in abstract patterns. Something violent had happened here, something frenzied.
But the floor was spotless.
Not clean in the sterile sense—clean in the licked sense. The tiles gleamed with a slick, viscous sheen, like something had run its tongue over every inch. Saliva mixed with whatever residue remained from the carnage above.
No corpses. Nothing left to identify.
I stepped carefully, boots squelching faintly on the wet surface.
Inside the treatment room, I found the nurse crumpled against the supply cabinet. Her throat was slit—self-inflicted, judging by the knife still clutched in her hand and the angle of the wound. Blood pooled beneath her in a dark halo, already congealing.
Coward.
Zilliam sat slumped in a chair near the examination table, barely conscious.
Her skin had cracked.
Not like Sasha's explosive disintegration—this was slower, more insidious. Her skin had dried to the point of fracturing, deep fissures running along her arms, her neck, her face. Pieces flaked off as she breathed, falling like ash to the floor. Beneath the cracked surface, the flesh looked desiccated—mummified, almost. Gray and leathery, drained of moisture and life.
She couldn't stand. Her body sagged in the chair like a marionette with cut strings.
Her breath came in ragged, shallow gasps—each inhale labored, each exhale rattling in her chest.
I stepped closer, boots crunching over the fragments of her skin scattered on the floor.
Her eyes tracked me weakly. Four amber orbs flickered in the dim light—no, wait. Just two. Regular eyes. Human eyes. The shadows were playing tricks.
"Still alive," I observed. "Impressive."
Her mouth opened, lips cracking further, but no sound came out. Just a dry wheeze, tongue too swollen to form words.
I crouched down to her level, studying the damage. The entity had done this—the thing haunting my mind. When she'd peered inside, it had seen her. Marked her. Now it was draining her from the inside out, leeching every drop of vitality until nothing remained but dust.
"What did you see?" I asked, knowing she couldn't answer. "Did it introduce itself? Did it tell you its name?"
Another wheeze. Her hand twitched, fingers curling slightly as if trying to reach for something.
I waited.
She managed one word, barely audible, more breath than voice:
"Aeshma-daeva ."
I tilted my head. "Aeshma-daeva. So that's what it calls itself."
Her eyes closed. Breathing slowed further.
I stood, leaving her to whatever fate the monster called for. I took a scalpel from one of the tables as rememberance.
At least I had a name now. Or at least I Finally remembered.
The wind picked up outside, howling through broken windows and shattered doorframes. I quickened my pace.
Storm?
As I passed windows on my way through the corridor, I caught glimpses—a massive tornado, spinning tight and controlled in the courtyard. Not natural. Someone's doing.
Outside, the view clarified.
A man stood on the rooftop of one of the corps buildings—lab coat whipping in the wind, arms extended, face set in concentration. Teacher, probably. The tornado was his, keeping several of those creatures suspended in midair, limbs flailing uselessly against the vortex.
The air felt heavier here, like smoke or fog had settled over the campus. It smelled of blood still, but underneath—burnt? No. Closer to ash. Like something had incinerated and left its residue hanging in the atmosphere.
I ran toward the external ladder bolted to the side of the building. If this guy was up there organizing a defense, maybe he'd know where Pamela was. She couldn't have fled. Not from her own dream.
The climb was harder than expected. The building shook with each gust of wind, metal groaning under stress. My hands gripped the rungs tight, boots finding purchase on slick metal.
By the time I reached the rooftop, my breath came harder—not from exertion, but from the pressure difference. The wind was a living force up here, battering everything.
The man in the lab coat didn't turn. Too focused on maintaining the tornado.
But beside him, slumped against the rooftop's edge, was a slender woman clutching her chest. Blood seeped through her fingers, dark and wet.
Pamela.
Strange seeing her in color—vivid, real, not the washed-out monochrome ghost I'd grown used to. Her hair whipped around her face, eyes half-closed in pain.
I approached, amused by the absurdity of it all.
"Hey," I said casually, raising a hand in greeting like we'd bumped into each other at a café.
Her eyes snapped open, shock flooding her expression.
"William?! The academy—it's under attack! Are you—are you alright?"
I glanced at the tornado, the creatures thrashing inside it, the blood on her shirt, the shadow-hand covering the sky.
"Never better," I said. "You?"
"You're full of blood," she commented, perplexed.
"It's a student's blood," I said casually as I approached her. "Everything's fine."
She breathed a sigh of relief, shoulders sagging. "I don't understand what those monsters are. They shouldn't be here. This shouldn't be happening."
I started chuckling. "Is that your husband at the edge of the roof?"
"Yes," she said, glancing at him with something like affection.
I followed her gaze. The man stood there focused, maintaining his tornado, completely concentrated on holding those creatures at bay.
I almost laughed out loud.
His face was blank. No features except a mouth. No eyes, no nose, no distinguishing marks. Just a smooth expanse where a face should be with lips moving in what might have been an incantation.
She didn't even remember what he looked like.
The whole situation was amusing in a pathetic sort of way. But at the end of the day, this entire nightmare was brought about by her foolishness. Her husband was already dead. These were days long past, memories twisted into a prison.
Why was I even forced into her dream?
When I was about a meter away, I grabbed the short woman by her neck and lifted her onto the tips of her toes.
She clawed at my hand immediately, fighting for air, gurgling something that might have been words.
"What—what are you—doing—?" she managed between gasps.
"What am I doing?" I asked, tightening my grip slightly. "What are you doing? Why the hell are we in your dream, Pamela?"
Her eyes went wide—confusion mixed with terror and the dawning realization that something was very, very wrong.
The blank-faced husband turned at the sound of her struggling. The tornado faltered.
Perfect.
"I don't know," she gasped, fingers clawing at my hand.
I tightened my grip slightly. "You said you'd 'do your part.' This clearly isn't what we agreed to."
"I can give you the entity's name," she wheezed. "Then you can be on your way."
I scoffed, unable to contain the laugh. "Already got it, thanks."
Her eyes widened despite the choking. "How?"
I gestured around us with my free hand—at the tornado, the creatures stalking below, the ash-filled sky. "What else could have brought all this? You left me into someone else's skin and went to woo your lover so I had Zilliam look into my mind. Can you believe she is so unlikable that even the demon reacted like this?"
She froze. Stopped gasping for air entirely, just staring at me with dawning horror.
Then a coil of wind slammed into my side, sharp and focused. I stumbled, releasing her. She dropped to the rooftop, coughing.
"Stay away from her!" Her husband screamed from the edge, hands raised, wind swirling around his fingertips.
I couldn't stop myself from laughing. It started as a chuckle and grew into something wild, echoing across the rooftop.
"Pamela," I said mockingly, "why did you do all this for a puppet? That isn't even your husband."
"Yes, it is!" she shouted back, voice raw.
I chuckled again, darker this time. "He has no features. Look at him—really look. You've already forgotten what he looked like." I pointed at the blank-faced figure. "Let him go. You've already lost him. Meet someone new instead of clinging to this sad reconstruction."
Her face twisted with rage and grief, tears streaming down her cheeks.
"You don't understand anything," she spat.
"I understand plenty," I replied, straightening. "I understand you trapped me in your delusion because you can't let go. And now we're all paying for it."
"I'm usually the one haunted by my dead," I continued, stepping forward. "Not the other way around. Pushing around pathetic remains like this…"
I paused, watching her cradle invisible hope.
"Let me kill you. That'll wake you up."
She froze, then shifted into a defensive stance—poorly executed, trembling. Blood poured fresh from her belly, dark and spreading across her shirt. One of those creatures had pierced her at some point. The wound looked deep.
"Stay back," she warned, voice shaking.
I gave her a dry laugh. "Sure."
As I approached, her husband abandoned the tornado—the creatures inside it scattering as the vortex collapsed—and jumped between us, wind propelling him across the rooftop.
"Don't step closer," he said, blank face somehow conveying determination through posture alone. "I won't let you hurt her."
"Don't you find this pathetic?" I asked Pamela, ignoring him entirely. "You don't even remember what he looked like anymore."
He threw another gust. Wind slammed into me, pushing me back several steps.
This wouldn't do.
If this was a dream, I could manifest my powers. The rules here were fluid, malleable. I just needed to believe it.
I breathed in deeply, focusing. The sensation came immediately—ash in the air, time itself responding to my will, slowing, thickening like honey. Everything froze mid-motion except me.
I pulled the scalpel from my pocket. Still unused from the infirmary. Sharp.
I walked calmly to her husband's suspended form and drew the blade across his throat in one clean motion—left to right, deep enough to sever everything important.
Then I positioned myself in front of Pamela and exhaled.
Time snapped back.
Blood erupted from his neck immediately, pressurized spurts painting the rooftop. He collapsed, hands clutching uselessly at the wound, mouth working soundlessly.
She screamed—raw, animal, broken.
She tried to push past me, scrambling on hands and knees toward his body. I grabbed her shoulder and held her in place. She was weak from blood loss, injuries sapping her strength.
"Why aren't you using your powers?" I asked, genuinely curious. "Afraid you'll look like your former body if you inflate yourself?"
She clawed at my hand, sobbing, incoherent.
I waited for her answer, patient as death.
But she didn't respond. Just kept crying, endless sobs that grated on my nerves.
I got bored.
I grabbed her by the neck and plunged my other hand into the gaping wound in her belly. Wet warmth closed around my fingers, flesh parting easily.
"This won't do," I said. "You can't just live your life for a dead husband."
A dangerous thought crossed my mind.
It made me grin.
I pushed my hand deeper, forcing through muscle and organs until I felt my fingers break through the other side. Then I released her neck and lifted her entirely with the arm impaling her—wearing her on my hand like a grotesque puppet.
I laughed—louder, more unhinged than before. The absurdity of it, the poetic justice.
Her cries stopped. Shock or pain, didn't matter which. She just stared at me, frozen, mouth open, eyes wide and glassy.
"You need a reason to live," I said, still holding her aloft. "If finding another husband is off the table, then live to hate instead."
I pointed at myself with my free hand.
"If you're so empty that you had to create a puppet husband, then hate me. Dedicate yourself solely to hating me." I tilted my head, grin widening. "I'm at least within the living. That's more than you can say for him."
Her lips moved. No sound came out at first, then a whisper—hoarse, broken:
"I... hate you..."
"Good," I said. "Now wake up."
She didn't know what to respond. Her mouth opened and closed, trying to form words that wouldn't come.
I walked with her raised on my hand toward the edge of the roof. She grabbed desperately at my forearm, clawing, trying to support herself—as if without that grip she'd simply snap in half around my arm.
I couldn't stop smiling.
At the edge, I looked down. One of those creatures crouched at the base of the building, hunched over corpses, tearing flesh from bone with methodical efficiency.
She followed my gaze and realized what I was planning.
"No—no, please—"
I licked my dry, blood-covered lips. "Continue."
"Please! I'll live only to help you—I'll do anything—please don't—I'll wake up, I'll fix this, just please—"
The desperation was almost musical. Almost.
I scoffed. "You need actual fear to respect someone. To understand consequences."
I pulled my hand out of her in one sharp motion.
She grasped at empty air, fingers clawing at nothing as gravity claimed her.
I watched her body tumble down—limbs flailing, mouth open in a silent scream—until she hit the grass with a wet, final thud.
The creature's head snapped toward the sound. It approached her broken form, inspected it briefly, then began to feed.
What a pathetic woman. No power at all.
I turned away from the edge, wiping my hand on my already-ruined shirt, and waited for the dream to collapse.
It came quickly, like shards of glass being broken. I was back.