Darkness
Midnight
Titan.
The man is nearly seven feet tall. His golden armor is garish but has an ethereal glow that makes him look like an otherworldly being.
“Sir,” Triggerman says, grabbing at his thigh. “The two you wanted.”
Titan’s helmeted face doesn’t move. Instead, he seems to be peering down at me. I can feel something scratching and prodding at my senses—like a dog pawing at the door, begging to be let in.
And, for a moment, I almost do. For a moment, I almost want to see what Titan might find.
But then he might confirm what I’ve always known.
Percy drops to her knees beside me; her hair plastered to her head and I process the fact that it’s raining now.
Fucking poetic.
“How touching,” Titan’s deep voice resonates through the alley. It’s a wonder no one’s called the NCPD or the Guild at this point. “This one doesn’t feel the same as you, Arya.”
“I know that” I growl, looking up at him. My body shudders as the bullets work their way through me. What comes next is going to hurt like a bitch. For all of us. “Don’t need to rub it in.”
Titan huffs out what must be a laugh as he gestures behind him. Rock guy lumbers forward, both hands returned.
I turn to look at Percy. Her eyes flit between the two men. She finally meets my eyes, though, and I give her a lopsided grin.
“Forgive me,” I whisper.
Shadows explode across the alley. The shadows thrown by the towering buildings above thicken and blot out what light was provided by the alley’s Affliction lights.
With a huff, I arch back. My spine screams for a moment before the inky blackness numbs at the pain. Tendrils spike out around me, pressing at the stonework and pushing me to my feet.
Titan backs up a step. Rock guy trips over his feet, landing roughly on the stone floor.
Triggerman literally screams. He makes a mad dash for the exit to the alley but bounces harshly off the manifested shadows.
Ice guy and fire guy both light up in their respective elements, but their faces are drawn with fear.
The tendrils of darkness swirl around me, each an extension of my will. Of my power.
“I normally would give you all a chance for redemption,” I say, my voice hollow. “But I’m fucking sick and tired. I have had a very bad day. And I would like to be left the fuck alone now.”
A spike of darkness launches at the two elementals.
They barely get out a scream before both are pierced through.
The jagged edge of the manifested shadow slices into and through them both—their guts and entrails spilling out into the alley way as their bodies collapse.
The shadow retracts as fast as it had appeared.
I dive forward. The rock guy tries to intercept, but he’s slow. I pivot around him and let the inky tendrils whirl and jab. They slice into the rock of his skin, cutting off the earthen flesh in strips.
He cries out in pain, his hands coming up to protect his head.
But the mistake was leaving his abdomen open.
He receives the same treatment as the other two and four spiked tendrils pierce his stomach.
They spread like someone opening a bagged gift and his entire gut opens, spilling gore and shooting fragments of bone in every direction.
The tendrils between my feet push me up higher than Titan. I send another spike towards Triggerman. It catches him around the ankle and snares him like a trapped rodent. He dangles upside down by the dark cable as I approach Titan.
“Interesting,” he rumbles, voice not entirely hiding his hesitation. “The Dark One masquerades as a simple Tier 1, then?”
“Seems so,” I say, stopping a few feet from him.
“Because of her, I suppose?” he gestures with his head at where Percy kneels in a stunned silence. Her slack jawed expression unchanged between the brutal slaughter and the conversation. “Or is there another reason for the deception?”
“You know how RISE gets,” I say, shrugging. “They might send someone bigger after me one day.”
“Yes,” he nods, raising his hands in a readied position. “There is always a bigger fish. It may be the single greatest lesson we will ever learn.”
The entire armada of my spiked tendrils fly towards him.
Titan is a killer. A murdering psychopath who draws delight and pleasure from torturing out the deepest and darkest secrets of his victims before brutalizing them.
But he’s also like me. He’s powerful. Inhuman. Functionally a god.
Alone.
An outsider.
He’d never be accepted, even if he weren’t a killer. He and I are simply two sides of the same, unmistakably tarnished coin.
And as his spiked, bloodied, and skewered corpse is pulled towards me, I almost feel sorry for him. Because one day, this will be me.
One day, they will send someone bigger after me. And on that day I’ll be helpless to fight back.
The last sensation is the concrete rising to meet me.