Chapter 3 – Avalanche
Ken's heart was beating in his chest like a drum ready to burst. His bare feet lacerated the burning sand, each stride pulling a sharp pain from his exhausted legs, as if they were gradually detaching from his body. The short breath, rap, he fled. He didn't know where or to what. Only far away. Far from this icy presence. Away from Zian's eyes. Far from the abyss that had opened under him.
He ran like running inside a nightmare, endless, without direction, without hope.
But behind him, Zian did not move.
He had remained motionless, straight, alone in the middle of the cursed desert, his figure as thin as an arrow, draped in his shimmering tunic that danced gently in the burning air. The desert wind only reinforced its majesty, making it almost unreal. He was not human. He was a law. A sentence.
He was watching.
And he saw everything.
A slight shiver ran through the reflections of his eyes, like the surface of a lake clouded by an invisible stone.
Because at this moment, his title manifested itself.
⸻
Titles: Prince of the Celestial Court of the Vermillon Bird
Effect of the title: Omniscient in the cursed desert (sees all)
⸻
An imperceptible light crossed his pupils.
Zian saw.
Not only Ken, not just his pathetic escape.
He saw beyond the horizon, through the layers of sand, in the hidden folds of reality. His gaze pierced the veil of the visible. He saw two other presences, two other anomalies, carpets miles away, invisible to the eyes of the world, but not to his.
Two other foreigners.
Two other mistakes.
He sighed.
A sweet and long sigh, tinged with divine weariness, like that of a being whose days are made only of purification, cleansing, erasure. A sigh that a human would not have been able to interpret.
Was it pity?
Contempt?
Or simply... boredom?
Then, with a slow, almost nonchalant gesture, Zian raised his hand towards Ken.
His arm rose, his finger pointed. He didn't seem to aim.
He ordered.
In the air, a shiver formed, invisible, pure, murderous.
A luminous crack appeared in front of him, barely visible to the naked eye, like a silver thread in the very fabric of the world. He did not need a word or an incantation. This world was his domain. The cursed desert, his house. He was omniscient, but also sovereign.
⸻
Unique ability: Teleportation of objects
Second capacity: Teleports large objects, even imposing structures
⸻
And then, Zian teleported an entire mass of giant sand suspended in the air above Ken.
A silent roar split the space.
It was an avalanche, but born of nothing.
A tsunami of golden grains, raised from a dead dune at the other end of the desert, reassembled in one go above the fugitive's head.
The shadow fell on Ken.
He stopped sharply.
His breath choked in his dry throat. His legs froze, his eyes widened.
In front of him, the light disappeared.
Behind him, the earth vibrated.
Above him, the sky collapsed.
— "...Am I condemned? "
His cracked lips whispered these words in a breath more fragile than the wind.
A single word would have been enough.
Yes.
But he didn't have time to think about it.
A colossal rumble.
A shock.
A deaf howl from the desert itself.
And then the sand.
A wall. An ocean. A living wave.
Bhhuuhhh - the muffled sound of a body ground under tons of burning particles.
He was bearied.
The sand swallows it.
The sand ate it.
The sand swallowed it, with the insidious sweetness of a snake that digests its prey still alive.
And then...
Silence.
Too perfect a silence.
Too suffocated.
As if the world itself had just been sealed.
⸻
Zian lowered his hand.
He didn't smile.
He didn't hate.
He had only acted.
Like a prince in charge of crushing anomalies.
He turned his gaze slightly to the horizon.
To the other two foreigners.
His eyes sparkled with an icy glow.
- "Three today..." he whispered.
His voice, almost melancholic, went out in the immensity of the desert, while at his feet, the sand covered Ken's last footprints.
And Zian left, his body launching into the air with an inhuman, silent, precise speed - like an arrow of light, towards the two other strangers to be eliminated.
⸻
But in this tomb of sand, something stirred.
A breath.
A rattle.
Then... a hand.
Ken's fingers emerged like roots looking for light. He satched his head, his face deformed by pain, fear, shock.
He was tanting, every breath was a war.
Tears ran down his cheeks, mixed with sand and salt, and he spat out a mixture of blood and dust.
- "Aah... ah... am I alive? ..."
His voice was a moan, a rattle of revenant.
- "It's really... really true that I'm stuck... in a world of power..."
His haggard eyes stared at the empty sky. And despite the horror, despite the death that had fromed him, he whispered:
- "It means that my dream..."
A dream he knew was stupid, absurd in the eyes of the world.
A dream probably impossible to realise.
- "Understand everything... overcome everything... reshape the world... perhaps by my will... It's... not impossible here. "
And as he got up slowly, his legs trembling, his heart beating, he saw something in the sand, not far away.
A body.
No... no longer a body.
A skeleton, but still dressed.
And Ken immediately recognised the fabric - the cut, the colours, the symbol sewn on the sleeve.
A high school uniform. From his world.
He froze.
Time seemed to be hanging.
He approached slowly, one hand stretched out towards the void, his lips trembling.
- "...She comes to my world..."
The girl, who had been dead for a long time, lay there. The white skull, the bones gnawed by time, but the clothes still held, stained with sand and silence.
And Ken understood.
He was not the first to be sent here.
And he wouldn't be the last.
An icy shiver went up his back.
He fell to his knees in front of her.
— "Rest in peace..."
Then, in a barely audible whisper:
- "...Please... forgive me. I'll take your capacity. "
He reached out his hand, put his fingers against the skull.
And his capacity is activated.
PREDATOR.
The girl's body decomposed in a pale light, disintegrated into soul dust, absorbed in Ken.
So...
He knew.
Not with words or an explanation.
But with instinct.
As if something very old in him was finally waking up.
— "...I know how it works. "
He looked down at his hands.
- "It's because... this ability... is linked to my soul. "
And maybe all the unique abilities in this world were.
Maybe in this world... every power was a reflection of being.
A mirror of what we really are.
⸻
End of chapter 3.