Noah held his hand on Sophia’s head, slowly observing whatever was happening within.

Freddy stood to the side, anxiously watching the examination.

Throughout the whole thing, Sophia merely sat in her wheelchair, her one arm twisted in a strange fashion and her expression slack.

Finally, after half an hour of work, Noah finally gasped and released his grip. A drop of sweat flowed down the side of the man’s face, and he wiped it off with his sleeve.

“And?” Freddy asked nervously.

Noah smiled ruefully as he shook his head. “As I said before we started, this type of neuropathology is above my pay grade. I can’t tell what’s happening.”

Freddy’s lower lip curled, and his eyebrows twisted.

“But,” Noah cut in, “I do feel that, whatever is going on, it’s gradually easing.”

Freddy’s head perked up. “Really?”

“I wouldn’t get your hopes up too high, Mr. Cliff. She is improving, yes, but that’s relative to her current condition. I sense a sort of… desynchrony within her mind. It is possible that her corpus callosum has been damaged somehow and that her left and right brain hemispheres are still trying to reconnect. But as I already said, this is just a conjecture. I am not nearly skilled enough to tell.”

“Where could I find someone who can treat her?”

“Treat?” the man smiled sadly. “I don’t think anyone in the Northern Belt could even examine her situation properly, let alone treat whatever is happening.”

“What about outside the Northern Belt?”

“I wouldn’t know,” the man said with a sigh. “You’d have to leave and seek the answer yourself.”

He deflated, sighing. “I see.”

“Now, if you will, let’s allow her to return to her room and rest,” the therapist suggested. “But I would like you to stay here for a few minutes.”

Freddy nodded and left the office for a moment, calling upon the staff member that was helping take care of Sophia. The woman politely nodded and entered, pushing Sophia's wheelchair and taking her back to her room.

The two men sat in their usual places as they did whenever they did therapy. Freddy looked forlorn and lost, and Noah gave him a few minutes to settle his mind before they began.

“Now… this might not be the most opportune time to tell you this, but I would rather not drag it out longer than necessary.”

Freddy scowled. “What’s going on?”

“We’ve had many sessions so far, Mr. Cliff. And we aren’t making any progress.”

“You want to change our schedule?”

“No. I think it would be best to terminate your treatment.”

Freddy sat there in a stunned silence. Bewildered, he chuckled, scowling and holding back a confused anger. “What? You can’t do that!”

“I indeed can.” The man sighed. “It is not uncommon for treatment to not work for people. To some, it can even make their problems worse. You… well… you’re neither here nor there. As I’ve mentioned many times, there is nothing truly wrong with you. You have had some terrible things happen to you, and your brain is just doing its job by helping you adapt. Sure, there are good and bad choices as to how you decide to adapt to your worldview, but I can’t be an authority on your behavior when you simply don’t let me.”

“Okay, wait, slow down,” Freddy said, still smiling nervously. “Didn’t we have a deal?”

“Our deal involved you cooperating. But trying to get you to cooperate is like trying to catch a wet bar of soap out of the air. You don’t have the patience for anger management. You consider gratitude exercises to be demeaning and refuse to do them. It’s the same story with everything I tried. If I’m being honest, I don’t think you can change until you start seeing the world from a different perspective. And you’re too stubborn to do that.”

“Okay slow down there, pal,” he said defensively. “You are trying to make me seem like the bad guy here, but if I remember correctly”—he threateningly raised a finger—”it was always ‘take your time’ this, ‘at your own pace’ that—well, what the fuck happened suddenly?”

“What happened, Mr. Cliff, is nothing.” The doctor sighed. “You’ve made no progress whatsoever.”

“But you said—”

“I have given you time the same as I do to all my patients. But taking your time doesn’t mean you can just come here with no intention of putting any effort into improving.”

“But what about—”

“Please, Mr. Cliff,” the man said with a raised hand. “let me finish. If this was a matter of you making slow progress—or even not making any progress at all—I would not resort to terminating your treatment. But you’re getting worse. I feel as if our conversations had only resulted in you reinforcing your preconceptions and strengthening your current worldview, the same worldview that leads you to destructive behavior.”

“Because you practically demand I become delusional about how things are!” Freddy shouted, still holding on to his disbelieving grin. “I can’t pretend like the world isn’t the way it is! Fuckers born into wealth and power become shitty people! I can work on ‘humanizing the elite’ from dawn to dusk every fucking day of my life, but how exactly does that change anything?

“Even Thor keeps making these bullshit arguments about second chances, but all I see him ever doing is killing these same elites! If anything, even trying to see these monsters as just ‘misguided people’ makes it more difficult to do my fucking job!”

“As I’ve said many times, Mr. Cliff, it’s a slippery slope. This isn’t about forcing you to become delusional; it’s about stopping you from descending into madness and tearing everything down.”

“I’m starting to think that’s exactly what I should do.”

“And I can’t even say you are wrong,” Noah said with a hint of cynical humor. He sighed and shook his head. “But I am not here to discuss the inner workings of society. My job is to help you handle the inner workings of your mind. I have never tried to stop you from doing what needs to be done. But as you are, I don’t believe you’re capable of enduring this responsibility.”

“I… Then what am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to think? Okay, I’m listening, I’m cooperating—just tell me what to do and I swear I’m going to do it!”

Noah opened his mouth, then slowly closed it. He looked contemplative for a moment and then, after correcting his glasses slightly, said, “I do not have the authority to do this… but if I did, I’d get you out of this line of work. I don’t think you have the right personality to keep doing this.”

Freddy chuckled. “Well I can’t do that.”

“That will be all, then.”

“That won’t be all,” he spat with a scowl. “What am I going to tell Thor?”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but that is a problem you must tackle yourself. Have a good day, Mr. Cliff. I’ll be seeing you around.”

With a reluctant, slow nod, Freddy got up and shook the man’s hand. “Okay…”

And just like that, he headed home. He had a week of forced vacation ahead of him, and not a single idea on how to spend it. Now that he thought about it, this is probably the first time he’d ever had an actual vaction.

And like many of the firsts in his life, it was sour and spoiled by circumstance.

For the first few days, he spent most of his time with Sophia, trying to help her remember who she was. When he wasn’t with her, he was looking for solutions to her problem, either by reading through books or asking around.

As for solutions, he found none. But Noah’s prediction had been correct—her condition was, indeed, improving.

She appeared to be slowly leaving her totally dazed and unfocused state. That being said, the progress was slow. Very slow. Brief moments of focus were the most she could manage, and even then, it was hard to tell how much she was really there. She still didn’t speak or move much, but Freddy noticed her facial expression… “lock in” so to speak. Like she was actually there for the shortest of instants, right before plunging back into the thick haze of a broken mind.

It was hard seeing her like this. Deep down, he still held on to the hope that everything would be fine once she regained enough function to use her talent.

But he struggled to hold on to the hope that such an outcome would come to fruition.

It was already July. Seeing snow still around was bizarre, but the weather was starting to warm up a bit. Every day felt slightly less cold and the clouds appeared less oppressive. The snow was starting to recede slightly, and soon enough, there might even be some rainfall.

On one such slightly-warmer-than-average night, Freddy left his apartment and set off on a walk around the city. It was a truly depressing place. The people looked tired and stressed out. Passersby gave him strange, cautious looks as they passed him on the street.

He ignored as many of these things as he could and headed to the nearby park.

Junkies and thugs occupied right about every single bench in sight. It was surprisingly crowded, with murmur and occassional yelling echoing through the sparse park woods.

At one point, he became tired of looking for a place to sit, so he chased roughly a dozen men off of one of the benches and took their place. All it took was briefly flashing his aura, and they ran as if the devil himself had descended upon them.

His brief showing of force had done more than intended. It seemed that he had underestimated crackhead instincts. That brief, weak flash of aura had been sensed by practically everyone in the park, and nobody hesitated to evacuate the area. It was a bitter sight. How often were these people bullied by those in power to be like this?

Well… that was a bit of a hypocritical question coming from one such bully.

Sighing and darkly chuckling at himself, he sat down, crossing his legs and spreading his arms across the splintered wood of the graffitied bench.

The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

At least it was finally quiet.

He hung his head back and stared at the sky above. There were no clouds, but the wind still carried scattered snowflakes around. The bright backdrop of the city around him made the night sky difficult to make out, but he could still see it with his enhanced perception. He could even make out the planets from the stars. He wondered what kinds of stuff could be found there.

Were there passages on Mars? If so, could he get there from Earth? And if he could, what would be waiting for him on the other side?

Pretty much all realms that could be accessed through the interspace had a similar atmospheric density. If the air was unbreathable, it was only either because it was too hot or because it was toxic.

If there were passages on Mars, that meant its atmosphere was nothing like it was before the Rift. Sadly, nobody could tell.

It was well known that the moon had no passages, as could be observed by its total lack of atmosphere, but that didn’t mean there was nothing to be found there. Depending on the ether density, it could very well be populated by a number of sentient ether constructs, many of which had possibly even reached the level of an eidolon.

Given how many bizarre talents there were in the world, it wasn’t impossible that someone powerful had already visited the moon. He wondered if he could go there himself one day. He wondered what he would find.

For a brief moment, the wind slowed down, and he felt a strange calm descend upon the surrounding woods. But soon enough, it picked up again. A large leaf landed on the side of his neck. It got stuck in his collar. He reached and pulled it out, releasing it back into the stream and sending it down its journey.

He watched the leaf go, and soon enough, he lost sight of it as it vanished behind a tree. The sight of it disappearing saddened him for some reason.

One thing nobody mentioned about power was the burden of being able to do so much. It was almost better in some ways to have no choice—to have to wake up every day and head to work and to then come back and have to take care of chores. It created a paradoxical freedom. Like a leaf carried on the wind that couldn’t choose where it would land, he would never be guilty of reaching the wrong destination.

He would always have the wind to blame.

Freddy felt like his current life was controlled by chaos. And yet, he knew that it was he who was in control. He liked focusing on training because of the structure it gave him. But all the training kept opening more and more possibilities to him.

The therapist was right.

He wasn’t the right person for this.

There were simply too many bastards out there.

He couldn’t cope with being able to make them disappear.

Perhaps this was the source of the problems he was dealing with. The destructive urges and hatred he’d built up through his life had finally received an outlet, and he’d let them make his choices for him.

While Noah didn’t feel like Freddy was making any progress, he wouldn’t exactly say that all those talks had been for nothing. Being fired by his damn therapist was also a bit of a wake-up call.

Sighing, he finally got off the bench and continued his walk.

It wasn’t even 9 p.m. yet. So he decided to visit Sophia again.

As soon as he reached the road, he mounted his bike and set off. The roads were getting a bit dangerous at this time of year. The days were quite a bit longer, and as a consequence, snow melted and then froze on the streets. He experienced a few close calls with flying off the side of the road, but thankfully, the motorcycle was well suited for handling rough terrain.

Before long, he reached the entrance to the Valhalla headquarters and waited for the gate to open. He drove inside and folded his bike, getting ready to walk into the main compound.

But just as he was about to walk in, the doors opened, and two people exited.

Joyfully giggling and locked in an animated conversation were Lucas and his girlfriend, Janice.

They spotted him and froze on the spot.

“Oh, wow, hey!” Lucas greeted with a chuckle. “Haven’t seen you in a while, man; how have you been?”

“Hello, Mr. Cliff,” Janice greeted with a slightly forced smile. “Lucas,” she called and tugged on his shirt. “I’ll be going.”

“Oh, sorry, babe,” he said with an awkward smile. He gave her a light peck on the lips. “Bye. I’ll see you Monday.”

“Bye-bye!” Janice quickly greeted the two of them and skipped away to a nearby car that would take her back home.

“I see things are going well between the two of you,” Freddy said with a gentle smile. “I’m glad.”

Lucas nodded and looked up at Freddy.

Freddy sighed and finally met Lucas’s gaze.

The young man had changed so much in the last few months. He no longer had a lanky, small frame. His shoulders were broader, skin clearer, and his eyes were sharp, focused and earnest. He looked more confident. A lot less boy and a lot more man. It was a staggering transformation.

“So…” Freddy said with an awkward cough. “Been a while, huh?”

“Yeah… Uh…” Lucas pointed a finger back inside. “Do you wanna go and maybe sit down for a drink or two?”

“Actually… you know what, I… How about we just sit outside somewhere. I’m not really in the mood for being around people. Besides, you might have heard some rumors—”

“About you going a little…” Lucas twirled a finger next to his head and winced. “Yeah I’ve heard. And that’s fine by me. Let’s find a place to sit down.”

They walked a bit until they found an empty bench.

Freddy looked around, admiring how different things felt here. It was a drastic change. The surrounding area felt so much safer—so much more civilized. That same tyranny couldn’t be felt so openly in this little gated community. He wished it could be like this everywhere. And he wished it didn’t come at the price that was constantly being paid by the brave men and women who fought against the rule of the other factions.

He glanced at Lucas with a pained gaze and forced a smile. “How’ve you been? Adjusting well?”

Lucas snorted. “Hell no, man. It’s been rough. I’ve been getting hit in the head so much I think I’m starting to get dumber.”

Freddy chuckled. “Having fun, I see?”

“Yeah, yeah… No… Honestly, I’m not.” Lucas’s fingers locked, and he clenched his hands, leaned forward, sighed, and frowned. “This… I feel like my life has changed so suddenly. I’m still struggling to come to terms with it.”

“Yeah. Crazy what becoming an archhuman can do to you. It hits you all at once. One day, you’re nobody. The next day… well, you’re no longer nobody.” He chuckled. “I remember feeling almost like I’d died and been reborn.”

“Damn. That’s exactly what I feel like sometimes,” Lucas said, chuckling back.

“How’s your mom?”

“She’s good. I think. I mean, she hasn’t really left this community since coming here. Technically, she hasn’t returned to her old habits, but, you know.” He vaguely gestured at the buildings around them. “There are no casinos here.”

“Yeah… Hope she can move past it.”

“Heh. I hope so, too.”

“So”—Freddy clapped his hands—”I see you’re still with Janice.”

“Yeah, yeah… But man, it’s been rough.”

“What’s the problem?”

“I’m always busy with training, and… well… I live here. As a trainee, I can’t exactly run around the city unprotected.”

“Yeah, makes sense. Sorry if this makes you worried, but…” Freddy raised a thumb in the direction of the exit, “you sure she’s fine? I mean she’s—”

“I mean…” Lucas said, then hesitated. “Like, she would move here; she told me she wants to. But man, her parents are so fucking… ugh.” He groaned and buried his face in his palms. “They’re such a damn pain in the ass.”

“What? They don’t let her move?”

“Dude, I barely convinced them that I’m not a barbaric terrorist,” Lucas said with a shake of his head. “I think they still believe our thing is temporary and that she’ll ‘come around’ any day now and look for employment with one of the ‘proper’ factions, and god, they sure do love letting me know. Every time I visit her house, they keep talking in French just to fuck with me. Even worse, Janice has been teaching me French, so I know they’re shit-talking me out in the open.”

Freddy cackled. “Damn, that’s… that’s something, all right. Also, nice! Cool to see you’re learning some French. Come on, say something.”

“Nah, I’m bad at it.”

“Nah, come on, I want to hear it.”

Lucas blushed and then said a few sentences in French.

It was truly fascinating. If a mortal had said the same things, or if it was a recording, Freddy wouldn’t understand a single word that Lucas said.

But because they were both archhumans, Freddy understood everything.

This was a phenomenon that happened between any two ascended enlightened beings. Hell, during his first real encounter with the world of archhumans, Freddy had seen a man talk to those “gege gaga” motherfuckers, and the man could clearly understand their bizarre language without any problem.

But this was, indeed, limited to only ascended beings. Janice’s parents were mortals, meaning they could openly talk shit about Lucas, and the poor man would be none the wiser.

Thankfully, it also meant that archhumans had very little trouble learning new languages, so such situations would rarely be an issue.

The two kept chatting about mundane stuff for a while and just simply catching up. Neither of them mentioned Freddy’s strange behavior the last time they saw each other.

At one point, Lucas suddenly went quiet.

“Hmm? You good?”

“Yeah, uhm…” Lucas leaned forward, and for a moment, he appeared to shrink. His eyes revealed an inner conflict as he unfurled his hands and looked at his piling calluses. “You know, back when I was a mortal, I… like… I had this perception of people that was… I felt like archhumans and mortals weren’t even the same species.”

Freddy was about to answer, but he found that he had nothing to say. So he simply remained silent and waited for Lucas to continue.

“You know, it’s so strange. I always thought I'd feel more important if I became an archhuman. Like something would change in how I saw my place in the world. Don’t get me wrong, I feel way fucking different than I did just a few months ago,” he clarified. “But…” His expression slackened, and he looked at his hands again. “I’m still just… Hey, Freddy?”

“Hmm?”

“Do you… do you think every life is worth the same?”

Freddy chuckled. “Fuck do I know, dude. I mean, obviously, they aren’t to the people in power.”

“No, I mean… fundamentally.”

“I know what you mean, but you know, that’s a tough philosophical question.” He blew air through his lips as he buried his fingers in his long hair and leaned back. “I don’t know, man… I think… You know, a while back, I’d have answered either yes or no, but now… I think that’s not really the right question to ask. I mean shit, dude, the empress is fucking important.

“In every way that means anything, her existence is a significant factor in the grand scheme of things. Same with everyone in power. But on the other hand…” He stared at his own unfurled palm, just as Lucas had. “Anyone can be. Any schmuck, be they sick, poor, old, or otherwise just weak, could potentially become someone of great importance.

“That same awkward cashier many spit and vent their anger on could stumble upon a twist of fate and grow into a calamity.” He clenched his fist. “That’s the thing, tho, isn’t it? Power isn’t a static variable. It’s tempting to say that your power doesn’t determine your worth, but how do you separate power and value when power determines who lives and who dies? But now it dawns on me that there’s an easy way to settle this problem—I do really think that every life is worth exactly the same. But not everyone is worth the same number of lives.”

Lucas stared at him, frozen and gaping slightly. He slowly turned away and nodded a bit. “And what do you think a single life is worth?”

Freddy snorted. “That’s a dumb question, man. How am I supposed to answer that?”

“Sorry, I—”

“Actually, you know what?” Freddy asked as he focused on his ring. “I got someone we could ask.” He extracted a small glass box from his ring and opened it.

There was a prime vestige within, and Lucas’s eyes widened at the sight. It was a yellow ball with a smug smile on its stretched face.

Freddy pulled it out, smiling back at it with a sarcastic grin. “Hey prime!” he called. “What do you think a single life is worth?”

“Hmph, isn’t it obvious? A life is worth whatever the owner sells it for.”

Freddy broke into a snickering laughter. “I see, I see, that’s a good one!”

Lucas chuckled awkwardly.

Freddy stopped laughing and asked again, “And what about those without an owner?” he asked with a “gotcha” expression on his face.

“They still own themselves, do they not?” The prime grinned. “Tell me, then, human: what would you sell yourself for?”

Lucas laughed nervously and said. “Man, I heard that primes are known for giving absurd answers to philosophical questions, but it’s still pretty impressive that…” his words trailed off as he saw Freddy’s stunned expression. “Uh… Freddy?”

Freddy snapped his fingers and quickly put the prime away. “Sorry mate, we’re gonna catch up another time, okay? It was great talking to you again.” He moved to leave but paused, slowly turning around to face Lucas. “It was really great talking to you again.”

Lucas gaped for a moment and then smiled. “Yeah. It really was.”

“I’ll see you around. Drinks next time. On me.”

“Sure, sure, haha,” Lucas said. “Take care.”

“Bye, man.”

“See ya.”

Freddy finally turned around and ran off. He quickly pulled out his motorcycle and mounted it. “Bloodshed,” he called.

“What is it, Master?”

“Get ready. I might need your help with something.”

“What are we going to do?”

Freddy grinned ruefully. “We have a doctor’s appointment.”