Everything was going according to Elmer’s plan, one which he had finalized upon after countless visualizations of possible routes he could take to end the lives of his companions while he had been in the warehouse.

The burning fire that had drawn Ms. Edna’s attention to the sconce of The Warlock’s Torch, and had given him the chance to send a bullet into Eddie, had been as a result of him imbuing the red spirituality representing warmth onto the paper of money he had hidden within the sconce.

This part of his plan working out had been one of the things that had made him have a fear of the success rate of his plan prior to now.

He had been of the mind that once rain had touched the paper of money it would have proven hard for it to catch on fire. And because of that he had done a few tests in the warehouse, using what little moisture he had been able to extract from his clothes to dampen a few papers of money in order to confirm that they could be set ablaze using spirituality essence despite being wet.

There was little care in his heart for the money he was squandering at the moment since he had already sent a hole through all he’d had in order to muffle his first shot at Craig Wiley.

In truth, that was the lesser of it. With all that was going through his mind he could hardly show love for a few papers of money at this point. He could hardly show love for even himself right now.

But at least it was all working out as he’d wanted it to, right?

Just as he had tested, enough spirituality essence had been wrapped around the piece of money in the sconce without causing it to crumble, as well as proved sufficient to setting it on fire as soon as he’d snapped his fingers and had sent a spark through the spirituality rope he had created.

It was because of that momentary emergence working as Elmer had prepared that he had been able to force Ms. Edna to take her attention off of him and Eddie. And as a result of that, the man with beautiful black shoulder length hair caressed here and there with streaks of white, found himself devoid of life as he fell down from his side onto the wet granite ground of the dock.

The sound of the gunshot that had befallen the scenery echoed a song which seemed to summon a glum shadow over the scenery, but before that could have turned into an eerie silence, Elmer quickly, but stiffly, swiveled on his feet and turned the nozzle of his revolver to Ms. Edna.

It was at that moment, as soon as he saw what made up her eyes, did he fully realize the extent of the irreversible step he had taken to ensure the success of his goals.

Ms. Edna had already crumbled back down completely to the ground after the gunshot, and from there, on her knees, watched Elmer with her eyes opened wider than how they usually were.

Her breathing had hastened, her body visibly tensed, and her grip evidently tightened upon The Warlock’s Torch whose flame had gone extinguished. And even though her mouth was agape, tacked on with her bulging red eyes to smear her countenance with a dazed look, words were unable to leave from it.

Elmer could see how hard she was trying to fight off whatever answers her brain might have been giving her regarding what she had just seen, and it was because of that he found his gun-hand shivering so much that he’d had to support it with his other.

A feeling of heaviness stormed his body then, and with its arrival came a couple others in the form of a bleak dullness in his chest, and as well the uncomfortable sensation that pertained to his stomach tying knots in an eccentric manner.

Every bit of air he inhaled grew heavy, and it had slowly begun to seem like the more he breathed in the weightier his body became.

Maybe he should stop breathing altogether? Would that make the pain that had now taken hold of him to be lessened considerably? Maybe—

He had really done it, hadn’t he…?

Eddie had been killed by his own hands, right? And as pathetic as he was, he couldn’t even look back to take a glimpse at the person he had murdered.

Somehow, it was way harder than it had been with Craig.

Was it because he had shared a couple of moments together with Eddie? Was that why he was hurting so much?

Or was it because his body was giving him a prelude to what he would feel if he sent a bullet through Ms. Edna’s head?

“Mr. Elmer,” Ms. Edna finally found her voice, only it was way under her breath and filled with fluctuations caused by some sort of shivers her inner being was seemingly having. “What is going on?”

Elmer’s shoulders pulled low instinctively, like he was trying to spare her life, as his mind returned back to the woman on her knees before him. He shook his head with his mouth downturned and squeezed strongly in a way that could have been caused by nothing other than a great deal of misery.

“I…” He tried to speak but he could not get the words out. “I…” He trailed off again, and that was when Ms. Edna shook her head as well and shifted forward on her knees.

“No. No. You do not have any reason to rush it. Just let it all out slowly. I’ll listen. I always have,” she said in a tone that Elmer would have seen as the motherly calmness associated with her demeanor any other time, but at this moment he was not having such kindness.

He considered how Eddie was laying dead behind him due to what he had done, and came to a conclusion that any attempt Ms. Edna made to speak sense into him at this point was most likely fake.

Elmer instantly strengthened his shoulders once again, tightly gripping his revolver with both hands as he aimed it at her.

Yes. He was correct. He could see it. He could see that what she was trying to do was simply a ploy to get close to him and reprimand him. She was an Echelon 10 Ascender, he had to be careful or he would end up being the one losing his life tonight. He could not trust her. He could not let his guard down.

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“Keep your hands on the artifact!” he commanded, and Ms. Edna shuddered, her face taking on confusion for only a second before it finally shifted into one of disheartened acceptance for what the situation entailed. “And don’t move anymore,” Elmer added. “If you do, I won’t hesitate to pull the trigger.”

Aside from using the sconce, whose fire was now exhausted, to distract her, as well as to keep her where she was and dispel whatever plan she might be having to get into his head, he had also given her the artifact for another reason that entailed her charms.

Exhausted or not, he could not risk her having the chance to take hold of them. She might die if she used them, but what he was sure of was that he would be going with her.

Ms. Edna rolled her head slowly. “Why are you doing this?” Her question had completely changed from the previous one she had asked; this, though, more befitting of the current situation at hand. “I don’t understand. Why… What…” She had begun to tremble slightly, and therefore her words found it hard to leave her lips.

Her gaze had already been lowered to the ground while her voice quivered as a result of the correlation of confusion and fear that were visibly creeping over her body.

Elmer could see that she had finally come to sense the imminent danger he posed on her life, and how her current circumstance proved it hard for her to fight against it. And as so, her desperate search for answers was just as an outcome of her miserably seeking a lifeline in the face of the impending peril his presence conjured.

All of a sudden, the feeling of his heart being torn apart came upon Elmer.

It was as though each side had been bound by a thick rope to a different horse and they were running toward the opposite directions, pulling like it was some sort of sport to rip his heart in half, or rather, a punishment reminiscent of the quartering execution method customary to the medieval times.

He really didn’t want to do this to her—he had not wanted to end neither Eddie’s nor Craig’s life either.

But what else was he to do?

Things had never panned out well for him, not from the first moment he could remember.

Maybe he was cursed? Because till now he could not still seem to understand why a five year old boy would wake up lying in the middle of the night on the doorstep of an orphanage with his newborn sister cradled in his arms, all the while not having a single memory of anything up to that point. None of his parents or where he had been living before then, and furthermore none of himself.

His name and his sister’s he had only found out because of the paper that had been tightly clutched in his palm at that point in time.

What else could starting a life in that sort of way mean apart from being cursed? And then eight years later his only family got ripped away from him, which in return had brought him to this point—a phase he would have never once expected his life to cross into.

This was the sad reality of who he was—of who Elmer Hills was.

He was a boy, untalented and as well without knowledge of the world, treading upon the dangers of the supernatural just to bring back the only family he had left. And as such he had no heartstrings left for any other person to grab hold of and tug on. There was no space in his mind to care for another. The only person he had to focus on was his sister. Only Mabel.

Ms. Edna’s posture turned rigid where she was kneeling down, her grip tightening upon the mysterious artifact in her hands. She shook her head weakly then, the lower lids of her eyes seemingly swollen up while her scleras had turned deep red even though she had poured out no tears yet.

“Say something,” she mumbled, her voice shaky and tinged with both fear and disappointment.

Elmer had heard her words, but his heart’s pounding, with each beat stronger than the last, were louder, and it was that, along with Ms. Edna’s dazed stares, that had forced him to finally grow tired of his silence.

He wanted to hear his heartbeats no more.

Elmer bit his lower lip before saying, “I-I don’t want to. But this is the only way for me to ascend without delay.”

Ms. Edna gasped sharply, her eyebrows flying upward as her countenance slackened.

“What—What did you just say? How did you…” The tension that had been clouding her body had visibly lowered in intensity, and Elmer immediately understood why from both her words and reaction.

At this moment he did not care deeply on how Ms. Edna knew about the method without being tagged as a corrupted one by the Church, as she and Eddie had been claiming.

Maybe the Church taught about it and its dangers at its college, or maybe she had come across it some other way and had been kept clean by the Church for some reason. Regardless, it did not matter to him.

All that mattered was that her reaction had put a solid stamp on the effectiveness of the barbaric mode of ascension that he had once been questioning. And at the realization of that, Elmer weirdly felt as though some sort of weight had been lifted off his shoulders.

Since the method was actually going to be effective, then his fiendish actions would at least have some payoff at the end. At least…

“It does not matter how I have come to know about it, Ms. Edna,” Elmer said. “All that matters is that it is a method that I cannot afford to leave be.”

“You do not have any understanding of the gravity of what you’re doing, Elmer! You have to stop this insanity now. Stop, before it’s too late.”

“Too late?!” Elmer’s head jerked backward in repulse at those words, his revolver still steadily aimed at her while his brows fell down. “Did you just say ‘too late’?” Ms. Edna’s tension seemed to return at the sudden spike in Elmer’s voice. “What do you know about how much time had to pass for my ordeal to be considered late?” His brain conjured a contrived picture of Eddie lying dead with blood spilling out of the side of his head, and in return he clenched his jaw furiously. “Eddie is dead behind me, it is already late!”

“No. No, it isn’t,” Ms. Edna denied Elmer’s claim with a low voice, shaking her head as she nudged forward slightly. “You just have to stop this and I can help you.”

“Liar!” Elmer yelled at her, causing the red-haired young woman to flinch back to the position she had shifted from. This was the first time he’d ever completely fought against believing the words of another. “There’s no way you can help me…”

It was evident on Ms. Edna’s face that she now knew there was no reaching the boy standing a few steps away from her. He was long gone, fallen deep into a bleak void where no words could venture into.

It was then that her reddened eyes finally let free streams of tears as her elegant facial features sagged.

“Please… I beg of you. Spare me. I have a daughter.”

And I have a sister… Elmer wanted to say as his face tightened painfully. But he instead left the words in himself, owing to the fact that there was no point in letting the woman find out about Mabel’s existence. It would change nothing.

“Don’t do this,” Ms. Edna continued with a trembling voice. “The Church will seek you out. You’ll be tagged as a corrupted one. You’ll be hunted all your life. You will be seen as a monster!”

Elmer’s heart skipped a beat, inciting him to press his lips together as he tilted his head halfway to his side.

“Why don’t you get it yet? It’s too late.” His left hand retreated from the base of his revolver and instinctively crept onto his chest, softly caressing the part where the Crest of Souls was located, while the forefinger of his right hand closed down on his revolver’s trigger. “I am already a monster.”