“Help!”

A high-pitched whine filled the room, like the cry of a mother who had lost her child, a wail so loud as to be deafening. Albert’s heart thumped as his mind filled with panic and worry. He looked around, lost, eyes swivelling here and there but seeing nothing but darkness and shadows. The light from his sword was caustic and yellow. He could tell that something was moving, a rhythmic breathing and the snap of something like a dangling cable, but he could not make out any features.

Then a cry of pain froze his thoughts in a flash of lightning. “Albert!”

Albert’s mind cleared. His errant thoughts crawled to a halt. His eyes homed in onto the source of the cry of help. But then another sound captured his attention again, and again he looked around in search of the source.

“Help!”

There was a creature. No, a wounded thing. A mass of flesh… something that moved and breathed and seemed in pain. So much pain. Albert couldn’t help but feel so much compassion for the creature, wounded and in pain. So much pain.

Behind, in the corridor, Lina had arrived and was making her way into the room. As she bumped into Albert, who had suddenly stopped dead in his tracks, she pushed him father into the darkness and the glow from his sword extinguished some of the shadows.

“Help!”

The poor thing on the ground, half buried by rubble, was breathing heavily, whining and crying. Then, an undertone of quieter whimpers, another voice blended with the suffering.

Suddenly Albert realized that he did not recognize the voice crying for help, that he did not know why he was feeling sorry for what looked like a monster, and he had no idea how it managed to sound like a person. All he knew was that it had been the source of the sound reverberating through the tunnels. However, the second voice he knew all too well.

“Scrappy!”

With that he sprang to action. A snap of his fingers flooded the room with light, and he could see. Behind him Lina took a moment to adjust to the new brightness, but when she did she couldn’t help but gasp.

“Oh, by the gods!” She cried, rushing forward. “What happened to you?”

Tears welled up in her face, and she threw herself not towards the broken, tiny bloodied girl lying on the ground in a heap. But towards the monster, lying in shadow, waiting for her to approach like a spider waiting for the prey to become stuck in its web. All around traces of blood drew a semicircle and disappeared behind an upturned table and a tarp, under which most of the body of the monster was buried. From above dangled an electrical cable and what remained of a neon light.

“Help!” The wail was ever louder, this time, a raspy breath on its last legs. The wet coughing that followed would have fooled everyone, and Albert too felt the impulse to ignore his wounded companion to save whoever was pleading for help. In fact, it was enough to make him freeze and doubt his priorities. Scrappy could survive while he saved the poor monster, it looked in so much pain.

As he was, he tried to understand what was going on. He knew that the impulse was not coming from himself, as he would never prioritize anyone above the wellbeing of his friends. No stranger was more important than those he cared about. And yet.

“Help!”

His muscles twitched. His eyes tore themselves away from staring at Scrappy. And as he looked away, the memory itself of his friend seemed to fade from his mind.

I detected a powerful attempt at mental manipulation. Counteracting.

Suddenly Albert could think again. Suddenly the scene before him made sense. It all changed in an instant, the illusion melting and disappearing like smoke being blown away by a powerful gale. Immediately he saw Lina, still under the influence of whatever was manipulating her and trying to dig through mountains of trash stained with blood with her bare hands. Her eyes were unfocused, and her head was tilted at a strange angle that strained the muscles in her neck.

He could see ligaments and tendons under tension when her muscles flexed, and the heavy table moved inch after inch with every attempt at removing it. Fortunately she could not muster her full strength while under the influence, and it was taking time.

He didn’t care about any of this. Immediately upon being freed from the mental compulsion he made a beeline for where Scrappy was lying in pain on the floor, on the verge of passing out. He took her hand and scanned her with all the Power he could muster.

Multiple laceration wounds. At least three types of poison in her bloodstream, and something interfered with her power, turning it against her. We need to stabilize her.

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Her hands, Albert noticed when he looked down, were blackened. The shadows that normally shrouded her claws were crawling up her arms and digging under her skin, highlighting her veins in a crisscrossing pattern of darkened and sickly flesh. Her head too was being consumed, from where her ears manifested as a corrupted and twisted version of her normal cat ears, the shadows spilling downwards and already covering most her face. As they reached her mouth, her whimpers died down, and she stopped breathing.

“Shit,” Albert cursed. “Jeff! Nullify her power!”

From the other side of the room, the rustling from Lina digging through the assorted trash in the room stopped. Then came the sound of something moving, righting itself, flexing powerful limbs.

What could have been a roar highlighted the distorted tones of a voice too human to be monstrous and yet too inhuman not to be. “Help!”

Albert ignored it, however, because the instructions coming from Jeff to nullify Scrappy’s power even only temporarily were so complicated it took most of his concentration just to understand what he was supposed to do. He followed them to the letter, his right hand squeezing Scrappy’s unresponsive limb. He felt the shadows writhe in his grip, wet and slippery, but they didn’t seem interested in trying to infect him.

Then pain bloomed right as a flash of blue light invaded the room. He felt, then heard something skitter against a hard surface, then again when what he realized was a personal shield covering his whole body flared into existence followed by yet another blue flash and a surge of fire-hot pain. Claw marks rent the floor, slicing furniture and bisecting a steel table like it was made of paper. Still he ignored it all, pushing his mind to the extreme. All his hours of training withstanding the pain made it easy, and his thoughts sought refuge in the knowledge that his passive healing factor was already stopping the flow of blood from the wounds.

Healing energy then poured out of him into Scrappy. The monster, whatever it was, roared. The sound that came out was clear this time, and it chilled Albert’s blood.

“Help!” The monster cried, slicing and biting while Albert shielded the small girl with his body. “Help!” It spit as it snapped its jaw shut around Albert’s shoulder, a thin failing layer of reactive energy all there was between Albert’s body and the monster.

The shield was not enough, and Albert had yet to do any extensive modifications to his body. Worse still, an emerald light soon filled the room. Lina had activated her first ability, and two mighty wings surged into being right as twin weapons materialized in her hands. With a stolen glance under his sweaty brow, Albert saw glowing cyan eyes settle their murderous gaze upon him. Beneath, a broken and mangled body told him that Lina too had been subjected to the sharp end of the claws, and her slow gait was punctuated by a strong limp. She was holding the weapons aloft, but her right arm was dislocated and the spear dragged on the floor, digging into it with a flare of sparks. Her other arm was sliced open, blood flowing to the tip of the sword and to the ground. She was ignoring the pain, but her body was too broken to move properly. She could barely stay upright thanks to the wings.

She swung with her weapons anyway, uncaring of the damage it would cause her.

Jeff? A little help here?

Time slowed. Albert’s power surged, cold sweat drenching his clothes and mixing with the blood that stained them. His muscles spasmed, and he felt the damage he sustained from the still swinging beast. In a moment of strange clarity, he perceived everything the way Jeff did, not from the point of view of his body but from a state of presence that encompassed everything within a several meter radius.

He saw Lina swinging her sword at him. He saw the tip of her spear glisten in the light of his glowing sword, lying discarded on the floor.

Next to the sword, lit by the yellow gleam of the geometric lines of the weapon, Scrappy’s form was frail and weak, so small and covered in a sheen of perspiration and blood. Even in seemingly frozen time, her wounds were closing at visible speed, and her complexion was regaining colour.

Then he saw himself. His crouched body, hunched over Scrappy to shield her from damage. Behind him, a furry paw with long, thick claws was coming down on his head like divine judgement. Around him his personal shield, created by Jeff in a microsecond-long window of Power use, flickered so quickly it was impossible to see it even in almost-frozen time. But Albert knew that it was not going to be enough.

I am not going to die here like this.

And so he strained. He pushed with his power against the wall imposed onto his existence by nature, by the laws that govern the universe and, should it exist, by the Universe itself.

The universe didn’t care for his struggle. It was not evil, nor malicious, but his efforts were akin to an ant trying to move a mountain. The mountain didn’t care either way, and it was not going to be moved not because it didn’t want to, but because the effort was nothing compared to its mass.

You technically can’t die. Your healing factor, while slow, should bring you back to life in a few weeks. Of course, your companions will die and you might be killed by the monster again and again until the Doom concentration reaches toxic levels. At that point, it is impossible to tell whether you will die a permanent death first, or whether the monster attacking you will.

Albert struggled. Jeff’s words were a strange melancholic tune reverberating endlessly in the ocean of thoughts that was his mind. Time lost all meaning. The veiled threat of an eternity of pain and torture was strangely muted. It mattered little, for the universe barely budged. Something did change, yes, but Albert was flailing his arms in a sea of molasses trying to reach a shore that was miles away.

Still he flailed. Not motivated by the fear of death. Not for himself.

Looking down at the peaceful face of his companion, of his friend, he knew he wasn’t doing this for himself alone anymore. He hadn’t been acting purely for himself for a while now. Seeing the snarling face of the winged woman, corrupted by the monster’s influence and pushing her broken body against its limits, trapped in her own mind, he knew she was a prisoner who could only watch in horror as her body acted on its own.

Much like him, trapped in frozen time, she too could only watch.

The only difference was that he could still push. He could still fight to impose his will. His unbreakable will shaped itself like an unstoppable force. Not even an immovable object could stand in his way, much less a puny universe. Capital U or not.

He was not doing this for himself.

He was doing this for Scrappy and Lina.