Looking at the ball of black near the end of the pier withered my strength away. Blue and red sparks jolted from my skin, forcing all of it to go numb even as my insides were little but piercing pain. I stared down the void.
Romeo’s adage firmed in my mind. No matter how fucked up you are, don’t turn away from the thing that could fuck you up more.
The shadow coalesced into a shifting dome. The jet black void pulsed and grew. Creepy. I tried to climb to my feet but failed as my left leg spasmed and burst with more sparks. Kayson reached my side, one of his arms hung limp from where a tendril hit him and tore the skin away. Suzaki was further down the pier—crouched near the Seventh Division Captain.
It wasn’t all bad.
In the chaos, the Viceroy took the chance to focus down the man who sent the Knight flying and scored several deep cuts.
There wasn’t a single sign of Bruno past the steam rising from the spot he slammed into the ocean. The dark made it impossible to spot him. Goddamn it. I spat on the ground and winced. All of the pain tore at my Soul Roots.
We’d come so immortals-damned close—the goddamn cheater. I stared hate at the darkness.
Whatever was going on inside wasn’t any good for us.
“Eve, grab Suzaki, the Viceroy, and Alex. We’re leaving.” Kayson said.
“We don’t got Bruno, and I’m not about to leave. Take Alex, but I aint going anywhere.”
“Bruno got tossed a hundred feet into the ocean. He’s got a better chance of getting out of this than us. Tristan isn’t himself right now. Whatever that drug was, he’s overdosing and losing control of his soul.”
“Well, shit, I could put together the fact that pill caused this—but the fuck do you mean he’s losing control of his soul?”
“Can’t you feel it?”
The oppressive spiritual pressure had shifted from an overpowering desire to subdue and suppress to something else. Something I couldn’t quite explain was an authority that felt damn alien. It didn’t bleed the killing intent before but was more ominous. Where it’d felt like Tristan intentionally pressed outward with his enhanced spiritual pressure to intimidate, the way this sinister aura expanded was reminiscent of something seething with uncontrolled hate. This natural strength wasn’t pushed off of it but instead diffused.
“I can’t even move, Kayson. Take everyone else and go, I’m too slow right now to keep up. Besides, this fucker wants me dead. He aint about to stop whenever this ends…” I tried once more to get to my feet; red and blue sparks flew from me like a cut power cable pumped with too much juice. My leg gave out again.
“I’m not leaving you behind.”
Kayson pulled me up by the shoulder, gasping in pain as the current running through me jumped into him. Still, he pushed onward, supporting me to my unsteady feet. Eve dragged Suzaki in one hand and Alex by the other—behind them, the Viceroy cleaved into Tristan’s last remaining ally with her ice sword in a shower of blood.
Suzaki kept looking back at the body of Captain Atkins, even as Eve dragged him away.
“We’re going!” Kayson shouted, then took one stumbling step towards the bikes.
Our friends made it past the void, easily able to catch up with us. A grim expression on their faces as we cleared the pier and made it to the bikes. I fumbled my hand in my pocket and fished out my keys—my fingers spasmed, and they dropped. I looked at the Viceroy. “Take them. You get my ride. Please don’t scratch it.” As I took her in, I tried to give a wry smile, but a muscle spasm turned it into a grimace.
She snorted, then leaned down to grab them.
The black dome imploded, swirling together and infusing all of the shadows into Tristan’s body.
In a couple of seconds, the darkness cleared and left the unnaturally still form of the Fourth Division Captain. Tristan’s skin was torn and decayed, half of his clothes burnt and torn apart. He shifted his head in our direction. A third eye blinked in the middle of his forehead; his eyes were voids broken only by a slit of yellow.
What in the name of fuck?
“Shit.” The Viceroy hopped on my bike and jammed the key in. “We have to call the Sects.”
“What the fuck is wrong with him?” Tristan didn’t move, staring at us with his cold eyes. His skin—the parts that weren’t rotten—was a lifeless gray. The Viceroy didn’t respond; my engine kicked on. Kayson set me on the back of his bike and then clambered onto his bike to try to start it.
A black tendril whipped forward, crossing a distance that shouldn’t have been possible for Tristan at his stage of cultivation—hell, even a stage or two above. The shadow cracked into Kayson’s bike and sent us tumbling. There was a loud crack as the motorcycle flew above our heads and crashed into a warehouse. The Viceroy didn’t spare a glance at us before she sped off at full speed.
I didn’t have the time to process the betrayal; Suzaki let out a cry and ran over the collapsed form of Kayson. As he gasped on the ground, there was a patch of blood on the concrete. Our healer threw a halo on him. Eve shivered, not moving towards her bike as I struggled to get up.
“What the hell happened to him?”
“They told me stories about the Possessed as a little girl, but I never thought I’d—“
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Another dark tendril whipped around and tore concrete up before cracking into a nearby dock. It suddenly shifted and threw gravel and broken bits of concrete at us. I covered my face—my arms taking the brunt of debris thrown at me.
Eve leaned in close to me, a shard of glass cutting her skull; her hand shook as it clenched my shoulder. “Shit, shit, shit. Dumbass! I knew you’d get me fucking killed one day.”
I couldn’t blame her. The sinking realization of what I was looking on sat in me. Alex huddled behind a bike, shaking and terrified. This situation festered in me like an infected wound.
When a cultivator fought their dao and lost a conflict with it—the Soul gained control over them and stripped them of their humanity. It shouldn’t have been possible before the Soul gained awareness, but who knew what those pills were that sparked Tristan’s explosive growth.
Tristan was now a creature driven by his Soul Seed.
The Possessed were monsters of legend—though perhaps this version was weaker than the ones in the stories. This reality of failing your path was one the Sects rarely dealt with. They often stamped them out during a failed breakthrough before they could cause issues. It was why they always had guardians when a cultivator ascended to the next stage—to protect the person and those of the Sect if it went wrong.
Tristan stepped toward us. Or rather, it stepped closer to us. The strength of its Soul pressure was more potent, but not terribly so. But the control was radically different. It had a complete and precise hold over the aura it radiated. A feat no living cultivator at our level was capable of. Something a cultivator would struggle to obtain until they neared immortality.
The most significant danger of the Possessed was their complete control of their Dao.
A wild cackle of rage rang from behind the monster. It didn’t bother to look; instead, it took a simple step to the right, narrowly avoiding a crash of wings as a woman rolled to her feet and propped herself up between us and It.
She looked waterlogged and pissed, but the Knight had returned. Her Enlightened Soul hovered behind her—the form of a woman with taloned feet and large brown wings flapping to either side, with delicate feathers running down its slender frame and an angry scowl on its human-like face. A harpy. “Time to fall to your knees, scumbag!” The Knight called as she drew the sword from her back. It was like the woman strolled right out of some fantasy book.
There wasn’t an ounce of fear in her expression, even when facing off against the uncaring eyes of an actual monster. She slashed her sword at the hip level, a flash of steel meeting the sudden protrusion of shadow, stopping a tendril from tearing into her.
In perfect response to the action, the harpy behind her swept in, its talon reaching toward Tristan’s neck as it closed the distance instantly. Once again, a tendril of shadow met the blow, catching the talon and suspending it inches from his throat. But Tristan couldn’t force it away. They’d met an impasse—the Knight wasn’t strong enough to overcome him, and Tristan couldn’t rebuff her.
The Knight retracted and then launched a quick series of slashes at Tristan to no effect; each met the shadow. Tristan threw out retaliation strikes, which, unlike her blow, managed to hit. They weren’t enough for a decisive blow, but he added nicks to the Knight bit by bit. Over the course of a minute, they began to add. Its blows grew stronger, and Tristan adapted to her quick fighting style.
You didn’t have to have foresight to see how this would end. They might be matched in pure strength, but Tristan’s Soul Ability allowed him to block every hit and add enough wounds to bleed her. Despite this, the Knight persisted. A grin on her face as she continued a meaningless relentless assault. The Knight pushed herself harder and struck faster. Winds buffeted out from her back as both she and Enlightened Soul weaved their blows together.
She wasn’t going to win.
I saw the shifting tides of fate as they flowed over the battlefield—little bursts of red and blue clashing against another. I felt the fate of this battle. The Knight would lose; she’d put up as much fight as she could. But it was a human against an all-seeing monster. In the end, those dark tendrils would wrap around her and crush the life out of her.
I looked at Eve.
“Get me to her,” I said with a hoarse voice. My mind was still in a haze as I watched the sparks of blue and red. I didn’t have it in me to summon another crow, which meant I’d have to get within arm's distance.
“You’re fucking nuts.”
“Please, Eve. Please.” Eve scowled.
“You actually are out to kill me.”
Nevertheless, Eve hauled me to my feet with a gasp of pain as the currents of red and blue sparks jolted from me to her. We were a singular point on this battlefield with an uncertain fate. The world bent around us—trying to reject us. My Soul was in constant flux, intuitively recognizing this but unable to fully control it.
We took laborious steps forward. Tristan’s expression remained frozen, but sure enough, some of the tendrils battering the Knight diverted towards us. He intended to end me. We were lucky—the Knight and her Enlightened Soul were swift enough to intercept the blows before they arrived. She was diverting them through a combination of proximity to me, my constant flux in fate, and her sheer strength.
Tristan intensified his blows, adding more tendrils into the fray as he stalked closer. He was throwing the Knight into a state of overdrive as she shifted purely to defense. She moved closer to me until she was close enough to reach out and touch.
I couldn’t rely on just myself.
Humans were only capable of so much; even if I wasn’t mortal, I had to learn to place my hope in others. Sweat glistened on the Knight. There was a smile on her lips even as she faced certain death. I saw Bruno in her excitement. I saw Romeo in her confidence, and for the briefest of seconds, I saw my father standing before Alex and me, promising that everything would be fine.
My hand touched her back, pulling out everything left in me. My chest went numb—the feeling spread up my arm. A wave of blue lightning tore from my palm into the Knight. The woman jerked as the cackling blue arcs of electricity wrapped around her.
Then she darted in, narrowly avoiding tendril after tendril. More and more shadows burst for Tristan as they stabbed in to kill her, but the Knight slid away, twisting through the air alongside her Enlightened Soul.
Even with Eve holding me up, I could no longer stand. My heart slowed as my whole body convulsed. I’d pushed way past my limit. Then I drove past that. It felt like I’d torn my Soul Seed out.
The Knight slid along the shadows—her sword drawing blue sparks where it deflected and caught the tendrils. She was two feet away from Tristan. The arc of her sword met the monster’s last line of defense—a black tendril wrapped around Tristan’s neck as he tried to stop the blade from its target. Blue lightning clashed against him in a violent burst of light. Tristan stumbled back from the gales of wind as the Knight used her Soul Ability to push forward, trying to cleave through.
Sparks rippled as blackness and blue fought one another—all three of Tristan’s eyes widened.
And then it happened; the sword slipped along the tendril, digging into the delicate skin where Tristan’s collarbone met his throat. The blue light vanished in another burst as the last of the imparted luck was spent.
The Knight seized the chance with a burst of wind and speed, her sword jerking to the top left—half severing Tristan’s head. She back-stepped with a flutter of her wings, watching Tristan’s tendrils flail as he sank to his knees. Dying.
Soon they faded away to nothing, leaving the body of the former Fourth Division Captain resting in the middle of the destroyed pier—accompanied by his dead Lieutenants and the second Captain he’d killed.