> ………………….

> ………………….

> Subject found.

> Beginning observation.

Ash kicked in the old, steel door and moved onto the roof beyond in a quick combat roll. Her father's frayed, black coat bellowed around her as she came out of the roll. The heavy steel briefcase she carried loudly clanked on the ground. She was high above the city streets; the air a little chilly so far up. She rolled behind the large air conditioning unit and peeked around the corner, looking out over the empty rooftop.

She swore loudly and shouted "Hostiles spotted! Cover me!" before she threw herself into another combat roll, and then another after that. She threw herself into roll after roll through the spacious, otherwise quiet rooftop, until she finally made her way to the lip at its edge.

She looked behind herself, her dark black hair whipping violently as she held her hand out. She could see the scene so clearly in her head; the blood flying from her pretend partner’s imaginary skull as a bullet pierced it. "Jameson, no!” she shouted, putting as real a choked sob into her voice as she possibly could, “Your death won't be in vain!"

Ash dropped her briefcase with a loud clatter as she jumped to her feet and ran back. Imaginary, faceless grunts descended on her as she threw punches and kicks wildly into the empty air. The emotional-yet-heroic music she was imagining swelled into a crescendo as she threw herself backward from a powerful attack – after all, it wouldn’t be the emotional climax if she defeated all the bad guys without taking a hit. But she was still the hero of this story, of course, and wouldn’t go down without a final attack and a badass one-liner. With a sweep of her leg she tripped the final grunt and got to her feet in the same motion. She flicked her thumb across her nose, pretending to reset it after a break, and spat in the direction of her pretend attacker.

“Tch,” she sneered, “nothing personal, kid.” Finally, with a decisive stomp to the fictitious mook’s head, she ended the battle. With no time celebrate, Ash hurried to an empty space on the roof and knelt low.

“Sleep now, my love,” she whispered quietly as she pretended to close Jameson’s eyes. “I will remember you always.”

The young woman choked back a feigned sob and made her way back to her briefcase. She knelt down in front of it and wiped her eyes of fake tears. But, as she unlatched the case, all thoughts of playtime faded away. She was, after all, a professional, and it was nearing time for her to catch her contract. Inside the case sat the specialised tools of her trade: matte black pieces of a sniper rifle, nestled within dark foam. Methodically, Ash took the pieces and began assembling the weapon, her mind for the moment empty of everything except the task before her. Her movements were practiced; rapidly she snapped everything into place before finally affixing the scope. She pulled the bolt back, took one of the thick bullets from the case, and slid it into place. The bolt snapped forward with a satisfying sound that made her smile. Peering up to the world beyond her pretend battleground, she surveyed the city. People, completely unaware of her position so high off the ground, went about their lives with no idea what was about to happen. That one of them would soon no longer walk amongst the rest. Noting she didn’t yet see her target, she let her mind idle. Thoughts of wetwork and contracts slid away as she nestled the rifle against the low barrier of the rooftop and layed prone to peer through the scope.

“Activating defense grid,” she whispered, and made a little shwaaaa sound as she swept the rifle back and forth while she watched passers-by on the streets below through her scope. With a jostle, and a few fake machine gun sounds, she pretend she was a character in a video game. She even pretended to throw a grenade over the building and quietly shouted “frag out!”, and with a loud mouth-explosion she took cover from the boom. When she leaned back up and looked back into her scope, though, she saw her target: A tall man in a dark suit and tie. The smile she’d been wearing faltered as she once again cleared her mind of her games and focused on the task at hand. She held her breath to stop the rifle from swaying as she put a little bit of pressure on the trigger. A woman walked through, blocking her shot, and when she’d passed Ash had to sweep around to find her target again. Unfortunately, she passed by not his head but his hand, and saw a wedding ring glint against the sunlight. All pressure she’d had on the trigger immediately fell away as she focused too much on his wedding ring. A stark reminder of the life he lived. Of the people he knew – who knew him – who Ash would probably never meet. Who would never know who killed their lover. Their son.

People who would always wonder who killed their daddy. She started breathing again, quiveringly so, as her vision blurred and her cheeks felt wet. Her next breath came as an actual choked sob as she pursed her lips tightly. She squeezed her eyes shut. What a terrible time, she thought, to be struck by her past so. Already she felt those dreadful images clawing their way up from the dark prison of her memory. Everything whirled around her and she no longer felt as if she was there, on that rooftop. Not when she could so clearly feel the smoke in her lungs. Not when her old scars started burning fresh again, and especially not when she could smell the charred flesh of her family all around her. She shook her head, as if to expel the swelling image of the man who took everything from her, and quickly opened her eyes. With her target gone, she desperately swung the rifle around in an attempt to find him. She had to find him. She needed to. It’s what Miss St. Claire told her when she found her in the wreckage: Keep moving forward. Don’t look back. Don’t look back, she desperately told herself, until her rifle caught her target again, in a sixth-story window. She struggled to squeeze the trigger, her eyes drawn to the glint of his ring once more. Don’t look back, she thought again, as she took a shaky breath to steady herself. It wasn’t helping, however, and she fell back on her tried-and-true coping mechanism instead.

“Finish him,” she said in a deep, gruff voice. Her breathing started coming back down as she hummed the Mortal Kombat song, enough that she could steady her gun. She could still feel the memories clawing at her brain, desperate to demand her attention and refusing to let her stop thinking about the life her target lead. But she forced herself to the present with her little song, with her game, and when she finally pulled the trigger her rifle bounced. Nearly immediately, alongside the BANG, her target dropped dead as a spray of gore splashed against the wall of the building.

"And the crowd goes wild! Fyron wins the game! Ash! Ash! Ash! Ash!" she shouted and chanted, throwing her arm in the air in a celebratory pump.

Quite suddenly, however, she stopped, looked to the neighboring building, and frowned as she watched people scramble around. She just killed a man; it wasn’t really the time to celebrate with a silly game. With a sigh she set about disassembling the weapon with the same practice as she assembled it. With that done, she looked back once more at the building across, her lips still pulled into that frown. Another life, gone at her hand. How many did this make now? She'd lost count years ago, when the number had gotten so high that counting any farther would have been too painful. Too difficult for her to take. Better, Ash reasoned, to distance herself; to pretend it was all a game.

At least she could have fun with it that way. At least she didn’t have to think too hard about who her targets were.

She pulled open her father's coat and slipped the case inside of it. The dark, black fabric rippled slightly as the case slid right inside, swallowed whole by the jacket and looking as if there had never been a case there in the first place. When her hand came free of the jacket, it was so cold frost had built up on her hand. She shook her hand to warm it up; the space inside her dad’s coat was deathly cold, but so very useful for storing everything she could ever need. She sighed and rested on her knees, her arms crossed over the lip of the building with her chin resting atop them. She tried hard to focus on the body of her target from this distance, and not on those memories from just a moment before. Ash needed to make sure the target was dead, which usually meant waiting for an ambulance to arrive and declare them as such. It was difficult to focus on that this time, however, as she kept looking at the body. She kept remembering his ring. She kept thinking about his family. How she robbed them of him the same way The Bad Man robbed her of hers.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Ash shook her head to clear her mind of those memories, but when it didn’t work she instead pulled her phone from her pocket to distract herself. She quickly navigated to YouTube to watch Among the Spirits. It was her favorite thing in the world; not just her favorite channel on YouTube, but her favorite thing. Very quickly as she started the video, her memories melted into the background. She loved watching the handsome host and his gravelly voice talk about ghosts, hauntings, and cryptids. Ash had been to many of the places she’d seen the AtS crew cover, though she never had the intense interactions with the supernatural that they did. The show was a spectacle, like any other ghost hunting show, and she knew that. But she thought it was funny how close to the truth the crew was. Her favorite episodes were when the host would pretend to be hunted by a ghost, but be completely unaware of the actual ghost hovering just barely in frame. Was it all a joke, she had to wonder, or was Graves really that oblivious that he didn’t realize the supernatural was really right under his nose?

The host’s long-winded introduction started to detail the history of the house he was about to explore, and Ash whined quietly when an image flashed on the screen of a burning home to illustrate the story the host gave. She felt her chest grow tight again; a sensation of panic ran through her. She backed out of the video and tried to calm herself, but the sight of that fire burned in her mind, and with came all the unpleasant memories back to the forefront, as if gleeful to once more wrest her attention and drag her back to her childhood. With still no sound of sirens, Ash decided she’d have to check the body herself to determine if he was dead – if she did that, she’d most certainly be too distracted by the horrors of The Bad Place to properly dwell on her own personal trauma. So, in the same motion she stowed her phone in her pocket, she grabbed the frayed edge of the too-large coat she wore and threw it over herself, like a vampire retreating. For once, this action wasn’t just a silly gesture. The jacket covered her – smothered her – in inky darkness and she sunk into the roof of the building as she phased through not the concrete of the ceiling, but through reality itself.

For a moment, there was a flipping feeling in her tummy, like when she’d ride on really fast roller coasters, but it went away quickly as gravity inverted halfway through her descent. She rose up from the same ceiling she had just sunk into, only this time the world was drastically different. The sky was pitch dark, black as the sea at night and completely featureless. No clouds could be seen in the sky, no sun or moon or stars. Just an endless, cloying darkness that if she looked at it for too long, it began to hurt. Somehow, despite the lack of any light source, the world was lit perfectly. No shadows anywhere, yet somehow everything was perfectly visible. And oh, God, how she wished it wasn’t. How she wished it was pitch dark there. At least then she wouldn’t have to see the horrible, twisted place she had purposefully pulled herself into. It looked just like the world she had come from, but wrong. As if someone had built it to look like reality, but didn’t understand why things were made from what they were. The building she stood on was no longer concrete, but a tower of something not unlike coral. The building across from her looked like it was made of pulsing veins, while the street below was made from teeth. Pedestrians on the street, in reality, were there reflected as white whisps which floated in place. Cars were represented as car-shaped masses of blood with windshields made from some brackish liquid.

Nothing there ever moved. It was stagnant; caught in place. The cars didn’t drive, unless she looked away for a moment. As if when being observed they couldn’t update their movements. The pedestrians were the same, their whisps hovering in place until she looked away and then back, to let them move.

She didn’t know what this place was called, only by the name she’d called it when she accidentally fell in as a little kid. It was The Bad Place. The Bad Place was the scariest thing she’d ever known, and the perfect place to torture herself with fear to remove thoughts of the fire and her family’s murder.

All Ash knew about The Bad Place was it was a horrific reflection of reality, and for some reason her family could move through it. She wasn’t ever supposed to come there, unless she was wearing a special mask. But the problem was she didn’t have her own mask; her dad died before he could make her one. She had his mask, but wearing it made her feel horrible and wrong. So she had to move quickly in The Bad Place without one, instead; if she stayed too long, The Things Who Live There would notice her. For a brief moment, she considered just staying there, on that roof, until They noticed her and came for her. But she couldn’t be sure The Things Who Live There would even kill her; it might become a fate worse than death.

She took a breath and jumped off the roof. She fell, but only because she reasoned she should. Falling in The Bad Place was always a strange sensation. She expected there to be wind blowing against her face, but there was none. It didn’t even feel as if she were falling. There was no sensation of movement beyond the rapidly approaching toothy street. There was no gravity in The Bad Place, and because of that she fell forty stories to the ground with barely a sound when she landed, not a hair out of place, and certainly not even a little pain. She could never manage such a feat in the real world, but The Bad Place was clearly a bad imitation.

Once on the street, she landed with a bounce on the hard, toothy surface, and quickly moved forward. With each passing second, she could feel eyes beginning to take notice of her. She knew better than to look for their source. Seeing them was no good. The Things Who Live There would never let her leave if she saw them, and the last thing she wanted was to spend a second longer in The Bad Place than she needed to.

Every time she blinked, the cars moved. She stumbled a couple times on her way across the street when a car nearly bumped into her the moment she opened her eyes. At one point she unconsciously placed her hand on a car when it nearly hit her during a blink, and she gagged when she felt the somehow-warm blood on her hand, though none of it slicked off when she pulled her hand away. With a whine, she quickly hurried the rest of the way across the street, making sure to keep her eyes open and on the frozen traffic to keep that from happening again. Once on the other side, she let herself blink to wet her as she passed through the wisps of people, and as she did she could hear their thoughts. Of course, they were panicked, all of them thinking about the sound of her bullet firing off or wondering if the victim had survived.

When Ash reached the building her target had been in, she walked up the side of it. Without gravity, she could easily do so, and she often lamented the horror of The Bad Place because she would have loved to be able to pretend to be Spider-Man scaling a wall. But there was no time for games for her as she made her way up to the sixth floor, careful to only touch the veiny building with her shoes and never with her hands, and looked through a window made from a thin film of mucus. There were only a couple wisps inside that she could see, through a hole in the mucus which was the perfect shape for her bullet. They were all pointing at something, but she didn’t see anything there. Hopefully they were pointing at her target; if he was dead he wouldn’t have a wisp in The Bad Place, so at the very least that was how she confirmed her kill.

Whispers soon began to claw at the edges of her mind; incomprehensible sounds that made her skin crawl and hair stand on end. Deciding she’d spent enough time in The Bad Place, Ash hopped off the side of the building and quickly made her way down an alley. She grabbed her coat again and threw it around herself as she jumped against and through its gorey wall.

Once more, everything became inky dark. She was overcome with the sensation of falling once again, but gravity caught her finally and pushed her back out, where she fell out of the side of the building from the space she’d jumped against it. She blinked away the light of the sun, took a grateful gasp of the clean air, and checked her phone. Barely ten seconds had passed, and the sirens were only just now beginning to scream in the far distance. With a smile, she texted her handler, stepped out into the throng of pedestrians looking up at the building and weaved her way through the crowd. Her only concern now was where to get lunch; work always made her hungry.

> Initial observation complete. Compiling data…………….

> ………….

> ………….

> Compiled.

> SUBJECT_DATA…………….

> NAME: ASHLEY_FYRON

> AGE: 20

> HEIGHT: 164 cm

>OBSERVATIONS: This Unit has observed this subject on several previous cycles. She is an assassin under the employ of ORGANIZATION: COVEN. Her unique genetics, owing to her HUMAN: HOUSE means she would be instrumental in both averting CATACLYSM: THE_END and protecting SUBJECT: TORIYAMA_AOKO. She is in some way linked to CATACLYSM: THE_END, though This Unit is not sure how as in most cycles she dies. Suggest intervening to keep her alive.

> Searching for other suitable subjects……….

> ………..