Albert’s face contorted and twisted, his teeth ground and his voice almost spilled out in a scream as the pain of the gem exploding in his hand coursed through him like liquid fire. It burnt and the shards were hot and cold at the same time, the raw mana impossible to tame, as time itself threatened to break apart. He didn’t know, he couldn’t know at the time, but what he witnessed there was the making and breaking of countless timelines that didn’t even have time to fully come into being before being annihilated. He could see, or rather glimpse at, the intervention of the System itself preventing a critical failure of the flow of time.

All the while he watched the world rewind itself by five seconds.

Activating [Strengthening], he stretched out his other arm right where he knew PsyOps would be and prepared himself to feel the most pain he had ever felt in his life.

Right on cue, it happened. PsyOps stopped moving back in time right when Albert’s hand was at the end of its trajectory. The man settled out of the reversed time stream in the same spatial position as his arm, and Albert knew he did it right because the pain he felt could not be replicated by anything he could even conceive of. His nerves were, briefly, in the same position as PsyOps’ upper body, atoms grinding against each other in their desperate attempt to obey Pauli’s exclusion principle, while the whole body of the man struggled to keep itself whole with a newly inserted interloper in its chest cavity.

Albert pulled the arm back towards himself almost reflexively, coming away with a bloody fist covered in wounds and bleeding cuts. In front of him was the frozen expression of pain and shock on the other man’s face, regarding him with wide, wet eyes before turning to gaze at the hole in his chest while his legs lost their strength and he collapsed on the floor. From the hole in his chest came a fountain of blood, while a smaller rivulet escaped his lips.

Albert wished he could just close his eyes and sleep now. His vision was blurry and dark, and his head swam. Both his arms were mangled and damaged, and the pain had turned into a sensation of throbbing and heat, with the indistinct feeling of cold from his raw flesh being exposed to the contaminated air of the sewers. But he couldn’t.

He closed his eyes, swaying but not falling, and teleported back to where his mother and Lloyd were waiting for him. He found them lying on the ground, blood coming from their noses and pooling on the smooth concrete floor, eyes rolled up in their sockets. They were shaking and convulsing, though: they were alive!

“Appraisal.” He said, voice raspy and painful.

[Samantha Cromwell. Currently unconscious, suffering a stroke due to the wounds inflicted by a careless mental probing.]

[Lloyd Cromwell. Currently unconscious, suffering a stroke due to the wounds inflicted by a careless mental probing.]

Albert disappeared in a hurry. He came back to existence in his own room in his house, heaving and coughing. He used a hand to prop himself up against the side of his bed, bloodying the sheets and his pillow, leaving a trail all the way to the drawer where he had hidden the healing potions. When he opened it, however, they weren’t there. Panic threatened to rise. Clarity, a hard currency to come by in the state he was in, seemed more and more slippery by the second. Then, words echoed in his mind, reminding him of when his mother told him she had found the potions. Shit. She took them away?

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He scanned the room, searching for clues. The potions weren’t there. Perhaps they were somewhere else, he thought frantically. Perhaps in his mother’s room. There was a safe there, where she kept money and other things he was never allowed to see. If there was a place in the house the potions could ever be, it was inside that safe. He went down the stairs, leaving a bloody trail from his messed-up hands. He was actively using his healing skill on them, which added to the pain and distractions from all the sensations coming from the limbs.

[Healing II] -> [Healing III]

The safe was locked shut. And Albert didn’t know the combination. He sighed, looking at his hands and then at the safe. He thought about punching it for a long moment before what little mental clarity he had left reminded him that punching steel with his bare hands was not a good idea even with strengthening magic. He knew a less stable person would have done it, but he wasn’t a character in a novel and two lives depended on him not making dumb choices.

He thought about his mother and grandfather, lying down on the cold concrete floor, dying from the wounds PsyOps inflicted them. A primal rage took over Albert, who ran to the shed in the garden and retrieved the heaviest of his steel weights before running back to the house, yelling like a madman covered in blood and gore. He didn’t care if someone saw him.

When he was back in the bedroom, he began to assault the safe with all his might. He hit it and hit it, over and over again, watching the metal bend and chip and lose its integrity. A small gap was quickly visible, and through it he could see many strange things inside the safe, but also the familiar glint of the healing vials the system had given him. The sight made him hit the safe even harder.

[Strengthening IV] -> [Strengthening V]

He yanked the safe open, the strained mechanisms finally giving up under the pressure. He snatched the potions, downing one himself to keep from fainting and then drinking one of the mana potions to replenish his depleted reserves, and teleported out.

The bodies were not moving anymore. He rushed to them, to his mother first and then to his grandfather and fed them the potions. Then, he slumped against the leg of one of the tables and waited, watching the world grow ever distant like he was receding back into a long and dark tunnel, his breathing becoming quieter and quieter from the labored heaving of before, and his body becoming heavy like tungsten. He closed his eyes.

***

Samantha Cromwell awoke on the cold concrete floor of her father’s house. The first thing she did after pulling herself up – only dimly aware that her body was in peak physical condition for some reason she did not know – was check her surroundings. While her gaze momentarily stopped on her father’s body, and she noticed that he was breathing regularly, it didn’t linger there for more than a few seconds. Immediately, she was drawn to the sight of her own son collapsed against a table at the far end of the room, with two empty vials of liquid some distance away, having tumbled out from his open hands.

They were enveloped in bloodied bandages, and a surge of motherly worry and unbridled hate at the man responsible for all this pain battled for supremacy in her mind. But as she saw that he was simply sleeping, and that his hands were all healed and bore no scars, she calmed down. After having made sure that her father was okay, propping him up with a cushion she pilfered from upstairs, with increasing clarity she carried her son – he was light, or perhaps she was strong – to the car and drove him home without a word.

There, she found the blood on the floor and on the steps, then on the sheets of his bed. She changed the sheets and cleaned the blood, set her son to sleep, and retreated back to her room. She barely spared a look at her safe, cracked open by a monstrous force, smiled and let herself too collapse from exhaustion on the bed.

During her long rest her phone rang like crazy. The HDF was calling her. But she didn’t care, and she slept on.