29 hours until the sun rises.
It was dark, and the crashing waves against the large boat were mixed with blood and glass. Everyone outside on the deck was shivering from the cold and the fear of another bomb dropping on the town. When a few moments had passed and another didn’t come, a small panic crawled up their backs and settled into their skin.
“Where’s my captain,” a young woman asked. “Where is she?”
The party was now over, and everyone was trying to re-group up with their friends and teammates they came with. In a few minutes a small panic began, as one team found their Captain dead. Half of him was on the left side of the ballroom, and the other half was near the center of the room.
Team 57, like all the other groups, looked to their Captain, Levi, for what to do next. They were in a circle, watching him expectantly, and he suddenly felt very small. His wife ran to him in desperate need, and he felt even smaller when he realized that he couldn’t protect her from everything. And when the rest of the guests on the boat turned to look at him, Levi was sure his body was now the size of an ant.
“I have a plan,” he lied.
Ace tried to focus on his words, but the more he spoke, the farther away he sounded. A ringing noise grew in his head, his heart started speeding up, and he kept wiping his sweaty palms on his pants. He tried to sit down on the ground, but instead fell over. Fenton caught him on the way down and tried to take care of Ace the best he could.
Fenton held his head in his lap while Ace drifted in and out of consciousness.
“What’s happening,” Levi asked.
“His aura looks like his ability is evolving but I’ve never seen one so violent before,” Fenton replied. “Maybe because it happened late?”
Fenton gently pushed one of Ace’s eyelids up and instead of regular pupils, he saw stars. When looking into his eyes, he felt as if he was staring into the depths of the cosmos, it’s eternal abyss glaring right back at him.
“What the hell,” Fenton said softly. “What is this?”
Fenton gently patted his face to wake him up causing him to groan. Ace’s groans sounded deep, heavy, and animalistic. His mouth continued to open, wider and wider, his ears elongated, and incisors grew. Fenton was frozen in place watching the horrible transformation and being unable to stop it.
After a few seconds the groaning stopped, and everyone held their breath.
Then the screams began.
Ace’s mouth hung agape as many screams, many voices, of men and women, one a child, all overlapping, coming out of his mouth, all of them in pain. It sounded like a megaphone was dropped into the depths of Hell itself, and the sounds flowed forth his mouth, a stream of insanity unending.
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Nero and Adonis walked out of a portal into Nero’s penthouse in the southern part of Atlaan. The large glass windows and doors that led to the pool outside were destroyed. Whatever hope they had, to find clues to where Amos had gone quickly disappeared.
Nero’s white and black boots crunched on top of the glass, and he let out a heavy sigh.
They were wearing the same clothes they wore to the funeral on Earth, because it was the only long-sleeved clothing they owned. They were both simultaneously over and under dressed.
Adonis didn’t care much for the leather jacket; it didn’t help much with the cold. Nero’s faux white coat made him too hot, especially with the sword’s magic power of always keeping him warm.
“I don’t know why I thought he’d be here,” Nero grumbled. “We should lea-“
He stopped midsentence and his eyes glazed over.
“We should what,” Adonis asked.
Nero stared off into space and the only sound in the room was from the wind outside. Adonis snapped his fingers in front of his face, shook him gently, but no reaction happened. Nero’s body went limp, and Adonis caught him before he fell into a sea of glass.
“Don’t do this. Please don’t die like this,” Adonis begged.
Nero jerked upwards, in a sweat, eyes fluttering and dazed. He grabbed Adonis by his arms, looked up at him, and a different voice came out of his mouth.
“Help me.”
“I can’t,” Nero replied out loud, to himself.
“This hurts. Everything hurts,” the foreign voice, from his own mouth replied.
Adonis watched in utter confusion as he continued to have a coherent conversation with himself, voices changing. He had no idea what Nero was saying, all of it spoken in Ionadian, most of it slurred.
“I can’t get you right now. I don’t even know where you are,” Nero said.
“My head burns,” the other voice replied.
“Don’t be scared.”
“I’m dying.”
“We’re dying,” they said in unison.
In a trance-like state, Nero looked at Adonis and announced that they needed to go to a bar during an invasion. Afterwards, a boat.
He did not take it well.
“You’re talking to yourself! You’re crazy!”
“Don’t call me crazy,” Nero shrieked. “I am not crazy!”
A big, oblong portal appeared in the living room and Nero attempted to get to it. Adonis held on to him with herculean strength.
“Let go of me,” Nero screamed. “I need to find myself!”
“What?”
Another portal appeared beneath their feet and the two of them fell through it, right on top of the remains of the Solar Flare. They rolled down the mound of rubble and into the street, covering their bodies in ash and dirt. The only part left of the solar flare were the pillars inside the restaurant that helped hold the roof up.
A mangled car broke their fall, causing Adonis to cry out in pain but Nero kept going.
He ran up the large mound of rubble, to the very top, his eyes flitting back and forth in mania.
“Where am I,” he screamed. “Where!?”
He flung pieces of brick and stone down the mound, looking for the other piece of himself buried deep underneath. When Adonis made it to the top he watched in disbelief. Nero shouted out his own name repeatedly in a trance and didn’t stop until Adonis covered his mouth.
“What the fuck is wrong with you? Stop, please, stop,” Adonis pleaded.
Nero mumbled many words quietly under his breath, his eyes still darting back and forth, looking at nothing in particular. Suddenly, he glanced up at Adonis, right in his eyes, and licked his hand.
“Fuck!”
Nero broke free, clenched his fists, and his eyes turned coal black. When he opened his hands, small black discs opened up in the palm of his hands. He put his hands back onto the pile, causing it to shift underneath their feet. A portal popped up down below, with rocks and debris flowing out of it.
Adonis didn’t know what to do, so he watched as his friend kept going, lower and lower, until he found two bodies. The first was a pale man, with many piercings and short black hair. He was holding onto another man, this one a man with an uncanny similarity to the one that dug him up.
“I found me.”