Everyone started running around, the smaller children running away and the teenagers chasing after them with desperation.
The boy just stood where he was thrown by Number 10 until he saw a teenager go after him. The child scrambled away, diving into the throng of murderous children in a desperate attempt to escape the teen.
His ears, that were usually so helpful, made every second in this chaotic mess painful. The high pitched screams of children fighting, choking and dying rang in his head, causing him to feel as if a drill was piercing it’s way into his brain.
But that wasn’t all. Being the smallest child in the room, he had to keep constantly on the move,
slithering out of a tall teenager’s grasp,
struggling to get a person’s hands off his neck,
ducking between a teenager’s legs,
leaning back to avoid an outstretched hand,
diving down and then jumping back up to avoid a flying fist,
desperately rolling backwards to avoid a kick,
lifting himself up and then violently taking a fist to the face making him collapse onto the floor, but, wiping his nose, he rose quickly and continued his tactic of constantly being on the move before suddenly bursting free of the throng and then running into a wall.
He smacked into the wall, bouncing right off and falling onto his butt.
Hearing a sound behind him, he saw the reason why none of the children were coming to this area.
A blonde haired teenager with the carcasses of various children strewn around him, and a knife in his hand.
“More prey?”
He ran towards the boy who lunged diagonally upwards back to his feet, back against the wall, facing the teenager.
The boy was trapped.
His thoughts racing a thousand miles an hour, he couldn’t find any other way to survive the young adult’s attack than to try and take the knife from him.
But that was easier said than done.
The teenager lunged forwards, knife hurtling towards the child’s neck.
The child ducked but the knife still managed to catch him on the side of the neck. Pressing his hand against his neck to stem the blood flow, he threw himself backwards to avoid yet another knife thrust. The teenager grinned.
“You’re quite a lot better than my other prey, kid.”
The boy, suddenly irritated at the thought of being called prey again, snarled and started running at the young man before he could even rethink his decision.
As the boy sprinted at the blonde, the teenager lunged forward, knife in hand aiming straight for the boy’s chest.
As the knife approached precariously close towards the left side of the boy’s chest, time seemed to slow down for the boy as unbeknownst to him, his pupils turned into slits. The boy couldn’t move any faster, but he could still move more precisely, using every millisecond of time efficiently enough to move out of the way of the dagger, and grab it out of the teenager’s outstretched hand, but as soon as he did this, time began to flow normally again.
The blonde looked at his hand incredulously before glaring at the boy.
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“I’ll fucking kill you.”
The young adult, who seemed to have lost all sense of reason, tried to take the knife back, but as an almost instinctive move, the boy slashed the knife at the teenager's neck.
There was a pause as both enemies stared at each other, both pairs of eyes filled with the same horror and disgust.
And as blood spurted out from the blonde’s throat, painting his adversary red, the boy knelt on the ground and vomited violently, retching and retching as more and more blood was emptied out onto his head.
The boy could still feel the sensation. The faint feeling of resistance, and then almost hearing a dull crunch, the knife increased in power and ripped through his neck. He looked down at his crimson, shaking hands. He had dropped the knife while retching.
He didn’t want to pick it back up. He didn’t. But he had no choice. It was to survive in this cruel place he had been thrown into.
However, he swore to himself to only attack those who attacked him. His eyes glinted in determination as he spotted yet another teenager running at him, this time with nothing in his hand, screaming,
“Give me that fucking knife or I’ll fucking rip you apart!!!!”
The child’s pupils once again constricted into slit pupils as from an outsider's perspective, he smoothly stepped to the side while slashing at the teenager’s neck, this time almost beheading him with the unnatural power that slumbered in his body.
As the child left the teenager behind,
he slashed and stabbed and cut
And killed
And killed
And killed
And killed
And killed
And killed to survive, dyeing himself redder and redder as the bloody battle continued.
Finally, once the room that was once filled with thousands of children became half empty, number 10 appeared once again, like an evil devil given life.
“Stop.”
At this one word, everyone was forced to freeze, no matter what they were doing.
Number 10’s once lively voice had turned solemn.
“Now that you have gotten rid of the trash, and have all tasted the sweet taste of your first kill, Umbra has granted you the honour to get your bodies and minds reforged.”
Number 10 clicked his fingers, and the just over thousand children left disappeared from the room before reappearing with him in a large room facing a long corridor that had hundreds of doors on each side.
“Now you will all be sent into a room one by one.”
Suddenly, all the doors of the corridor opened at the same time, and more dark clothed agents of Umbra flooded out to each grab one child before dragging him back into their respective rooms, voluntarily or not.
But the boy was left all alone.
Seeing his confusion, number 10 told him,
“Since you have the potential to be one of the numbered, I’m afraid your reforging will take a much longer time, but luckily, we have just the facility you need…”
Curious, the child raised his eyes to the dark robed man.
“We call it the time dilation room, where a year inside will only mean a day outside. You should be grateful we are wasting this valuable resource on an idiotic malnourished child who hasn’t even managed to awaken his bloodline.”
Finishing his sermon, Number 10 teleported away, just before another person appeared.
The person that appeared was around 2 metres tall and was one of the few people whose face wasn’t under a dark veil, but his looks made one rather see him veiled than uncovered.
It was a skeletal man, completely hairless with gaunt features, hollow cheeks and deep sunken crimson eyes that seemed to shine with mad passion.
“I am number 2.” The man coughed.
“I will be training you for the foreseeable future until I deem you worthy of taking on missions for the purification of the world.”
The man then unceremoniously grabbed the boy’s hand and teleported into a dark space.
The child was shocked. He could feel nothing under his feet yet he was not falling.
Number 2 then waved his hand and said.
“Appraisal room.”
The empty space then flickered and metamorphosed into a small white room with a small transparent chamber the size of an adult man with an inbuilt tablet on the side.
“Enter the chamber.”
The boy obeyed quickly, fearful of the man.
The moment he entered inside, the chamber locked him in. Just as he was about to panic, Number 2 spoke.
“This will evaluate your affinities, and show us whether you really do have the potential to become one of the Numbered.”
Hearing his words, the boy calmed down but then started to worry again.
What if he wasn’t what they thought he was?
Would he be sent back to his cage with his mother?
He wanted anything but that.
Soon enough, a whirring sound came to his ears as the inside of the chamber started to rotate rapidly, picking up speed as time went on. The sound got higher, louder and more painful until his ears started to bleed.
He felt as if the sounds were trying to drill their way into his brain, rupturing his eardrums as they went.
The chamber started to shine brightly too, blinding his eyes and causing blood vessels in them to burst, dyeing his eyes red.
As the rotating of the chamber increased in speed, his eyes rolled up in his sockets, and as he gradually lost consciousness, he hallucinated that he was staring inside himself and saw a metallic gleam, the flicker of a shadow and a bright, blinding flash of lightning that brought him into the realm of sleep.