The courtroom was packed. The air inside was heavy, stuffy, saturated with sweat, anger, and despair. The people sat close together, shoulder to shoulder, but even so, there was a sense of distance between them, a distance of pain. These were the loved ones of his victims. Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters. Those who had lost something irreplaceable.
The screams came in waves, as if the hall itself was breathing hatred.
And he...
He sat quietly.
His hands were cuffed, his back straight, his gaze absentminded. There was no remorse or fear in his head. He methodically ran through the options, schemes, possible scenarios of how to take over the entire zone, who would be first, who would break, who would buy, who would eliminate.
The feeling of revenge against the girl had already cooled, as if burned out. There were more important problems now. Far more real ones.
— Shoot this creature!
— To the electric chair! Let him die, the scum!
— Such creatures must be tortured to death!
— Kill him! KILL HIM!
The words cut through his ears, but they didn't reach him. He heard them as noise, background noise, nothing more. Like a tiger crouched before springing, he waited calmly. Waiting for one thing: the judge's decision. Everything else mattered not.
— The court begins a court hearing on the criminal case against the convicted party.
The judge's voice was dry and formal, as if he were reading not a sentence to a man but a report on a long-closed case. The courtroom grew quiet for a moment, as if everyone were holding their breath.
— According to Article of the Criminal Executive Code, the convicted person is sentenced to life imprisonment without the right to parole.
Tuck!
Tuck!
TUCK!
The sound of the judge's gavel echoed through the courtroom like a gunshot. At that moment, everything became completely clear. There were no "ifs" or "what ifs." Only the fact.
He gave a wry smile.
And then he laughed. Loudly. Sharply. And then he started screaming at the entire room, tugging at his shackled hands and trying to break free. His movement only ignited the crowd; their shouts grew more furious, their faces contorted with hatred.
"You understand you can't keep me here. Before I escape, I'll turn the entire zone upside down! And there's no way you can stop me, understand? You bastards, I—"
He didn't even have time to finish these pitiful words.
A sharp, blinding pain flared in the back of his head. The world turned upside down. Paul approached too quickly. His consciousness snapped, as if someone had flicked a switch.
The last thing he heard was the hall choking with curses, obscenities and hysterical screams directed at him.
And in that moment, for the first time, he truly understood.
He no longer had a single chance to do anything.
No plan.
No way out.
His last hope faded as his eyelids closed and darkness finally covered his consciousness.
***
He woke with a start, as if yanked from darkness. Consciousness returned in fits and starts, painfully, with a pounding headache and a metallic taste in his mouth. The first thing he felt was cold. The stony, damp, skin-piercing cold of a prison cell.
He was lying on the floor.
Looking up, he realized where he was.
The cell was cramped, oppressive, as if designed to break. The bars cast shadows on the walls, and the light came from above, white and dead. Across the room, on a narrow bed, sat a large, muscular, bald man. His body seemed sculpted from brute strength, and his gaze… his gaze was too calm. There was no anger in it, only purpose.
This look sent shivers down the guy's spine.
The bald man stood up slowly. Unhurriedly. Without words. Without threats. There was more promise in that silence than in any shout. And the next second, he leaped up and leaped straight at the boy, who had just opened his eyes.
He didn't even have time to react.
The blows rained down one after another, heavy, dull, and precisely calculated. The bald man struck silently, methodically, as if he were carrying out a long-planned task. Each blow drove into the flesh, knocking the air from the lungs, causing the vision to blur.
"What the hell! HEY, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?"
There was no response.
The bald man continued. The blows landed on his ribs, his stomach, his face. The world was narrowing to the point of pain. It seemed that just a little more and consciousness would slip away again, dissolving, saving him from what was happening.
But is everything so simple for a bald person?
At some point, the boy managed to break free. He rolled, pushed off the cold floor, and staggered to his feet. That brief moment, a split second, gave him a chance. He poured everything he had into the blow: anger, experience, survival instinct.
The fist hit the bald man right in the face.
Now everything became clear. Baldy wasn't just a cellmate. He was someone close to one of the victims. Maybe a brother. Maybe a father. Maybe someone who had been waiting a long time for this moment. And yes, he took advantage of the boy's disorientation. But still, the boy was far from weak.
Years of killing had hardened him. He fought like those accustomed to survival. He could hold his own against wild animals, if you don't count a lion or a gorilla.
A few blows and the bald man fell to the floor.
His eyes were closed. His face was bloody, swollen, unrecognizable. And above him, his knees clinging to his body, sat a boy. His arms were covered in blood up to the elbows. On his face, a smile. A real one. A living one.
"Maybe you have something sharp? I really want to cut something right now."
At that moment he felt movement beneath him.
It's too late.
The next moment, something sharp and cold, like a red-hot knife, pierced his lower back. Pain flared instantly, tearing a scream from his chest. He instinctively tried to roll over, but his breath caught in his throat, as if his lungs were being squeezed in a vice. His eyes began to darken with alarming speed.
He collapsed on the cold floor, on his back.
The bald man was already standing on his feet.
He raised his hand and hit again, this time in the stomach.
"You little bitch, here's your sharp little thing. It's not fucking funny anymore, is it?"
The bald man struck again and again, without stopping, plunging the blade into him, dirty, twisted, soaked in blood and the clay of the prison floor. Each blow tore through his body, mixing pain with a searing weakness.
Vision blurred. Sounds faded into the distance. The world fell apart.
And somewhere on the edge of consciousness a thought surfaced, quiet, almost indifferent:
"Is this how my victims felt... when I did the same thing to them? I screwed up so badly that—"
The thought broke off. Not because he'd changed his mind, but because he simply didn't have the strength to finish it. The final moments of his life had come close, looming over him, crushing him with all their inevitability. He didn't even have time to fully formulate what had suddenly become terrifyingly obvious.
Everything that came to mind before death boiled down to one thing:
He lived by murder. He breathed by it. He thought only by it.
No names. No faces. No past – just scenes, screams, resistance, blood. Just damned thoughts of murder. And nothing more.
But one thing was still a mistake in consciousness...
The last moment?
End?
Has life come to an end?
No!
The thought flared sharply, almost violently, like a final reflex. The denial of death was stronger than the pain, stronger than his body, stronger than his mind. Something inside him, deeper than his instincts, refused to accept what was happening.
Of course! It's simple.
Such a perfect example of arrogance and pure evil cannot die like this, pitifully, senselessly, on the cold floor of a cell, in the depths of an insignificant world, where his name will not even become a legend of the criminal world.
This was wrong.
It's illogical.
Unfair, by his own distorted laws.
After all, absolute evil represented the ideal of balance.
The ideal of balance between good and evil.
Not light. Not darkness. But the very point of balance, where one exists only because the other exists.
But such pure evil cannot rot here. It cannot bleed under the blows of someone's personal vendetta. It cannot vanish without leaving a trace.
The pain suddenly became distant. Dull. Almost insignificant. The bald man continued to move, continued to stab, but these movements seemed no longer to be happening to him. The world began to crack, not literally, but within perception. Space lost its shape. Time stretched out into a viscous, stretching thread.
Consciousness did not fade, it fell through.
And in that abyss, at the very bottom, something stirred. Not a thought. Not a voice. Not an image. But a feeling – ancient, heavy, confident.
You're not finished yet.
Half the cell vanished. The screams, the blows, the pain – everything dissolved, as if it had been an illusion. Only emptiness remained… and the feeling that emptiness was staring back at him.
Not as a judge.
Not as a savior.
But as something that has been waiting for a long time.