V – 00002.6 – Just Because I’m A Bad Guy Doesn’t Mean I’m Bad Guy.
I looked back to the boy’s father and then to the boy himself; I could see in his face he looked apprehensive about following me, or maybe it was about leaving his father.
We’ll deal with that interloper later; a child doesn’t need to see what I do to trespassers. I thought inwardly as I told the body to follow me.
“Stick close; it’s easy to fall or get hurt out here in the dark,” I said as I walked the child back to my open hut. As I walked with the child, I had a brief internal dialogue with the slightly more sane voices in my head.
What the fuck are we doing? You don’t know how to look after a child, and offering to take him to the city—are you fucking insane!
Look, I panicked. It’s not like I could just leave him.
The fuck you couldn’t; you claimed a baker's fucking dozen of lives today, but suddenly you’re above leaving a child lost in the woods.
YEAH! You’re fucking right. I am above leaving a helpless child alone with a fucking creature who prefers kicking his ass to making sure he’s safe in a monster-infested, freezing-cold forest.
So what about what you said before, about no one getting off easy about making people pay? Came another voice in my mind.
Humanity has fucking issues, and yeah, I’m not willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to the species that was given thumbs and moved laterally from jacking off to nuclear genocide, but that doesn’t mean every single one gets punished indiscriminately, for no reason. Especially not children.
You better know what you’re doing, Viktor, for all of our sakes.
I cut my internal conversation short as I arrived at the hut with the kid, who I could hear occasionally shiver. Emphasizing further how cold it was getting, something that I was only now realizing I was strangely resistant to, I knew it was cold and that winter was coming, but it didn’t particularly bother me.
“Give me a few minutes, alright kid, I’ll get a fire started and you can warm up.”
The boy gave me a quiet “Okay” as I knelt down to my fire pit and pulled a lighter from my pocket and started sparking the twigs and leaves to flame. It took me a few minutes to get the fire properly started, but once I did, the temperature began to rapidly rise, pushing a numbness I’d learned to ignore from my extremities and bathing the camp in orange light.
Once the fire was started, the boy walked towards the stone fire pit, and for a brief moment I was as surprised by his appearance as he looked by mine.
He was covered in bruises, and he looked malnourished; seeing him in light instead of hazy black and white showed me just how terrible he looked. His hair was thin and split at the ends, his curly locks too long and uncared for; he was caked in dirt to the point where I had trouble distinguishing where a particular nasty bruise ended and dirt began; one of his eyes was black and purple, and he was deathly thin; his cheeks were gaunt and pulled tight, and so was the rest of his skin.
His body displayed a kind of starvation that you couldn’t get over in a few days or a week; it spoke to long-term neglect, and somewhere deep down in my long, cold heart, I felt a pang of rage even more so at how he reminded me of myself when I was his age.
As I stared at him, he stared at me, taking in my inhuman features, my bloody clothing, and the massive scars that were visible anywhere there was damage to my clothes. My long, slightly curved claws, which were set into my large hands, seemed to hold his attention the most until I opened my mouth to speak and he saw my fangs and beat me to starting a conversation.
“Umm, sir, A… Are you a demon?” he asked in a nervous tone.
The question came so far out of left field that it made me bark out an involuntary laugh. “No… Well, at least I don’t think I am,” I said in a light tone as I sat down on the ground.
The boy looked at me for a moment, seeming confused as he sat on the other side of the fire, before he seemed to understand. “Sir, are you ok? You sound a bit drunk.”
Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.
Now it was my turn to look confused, and I sat there for a moment puzzled by how I sounded drunk. “What do you mean?” I asked.
“Umm, it’s, uh, just that you slur your words a lot, like Father does when he’s drunk, and a lot of your words come out really quiet, like you’re mumbling.”
“Really? I hadn’t noticed; maybe it’s because I haven’t really had anyone to talk to for a long time. I heard that happens if you don’t talk to people for long enough. You start to lose the ability to speak properly.” I said, saying the last part more to myself than the boy.
“So… sir if.”
“Call me Viktor. I don’t even think I’m that much older than you, kid,” I said, interrupting him.
“Okay, Viktor, so I’m sorry if this is rude, but if you’re not, you know... what are you?” he asked, clearly attempting to avoid calling me a demon again but unable to restrain his curiosity.
“I’m human mostly; I’m just not fully human anymore. I have some wolf in me and possibly some seriously large quantities of Neanderthal DNA mixed in there.”
The kid stared at me for several long moments, clearly not noticing or, at the very least, not finding my attempted joke funny. A long silence reigned between the two of us before the kid opened his mouth again. “So you were born like this?” he asked me.
“Not quite. I’ve always been a genetic aberrant, I suppose, but the claws, fangs, and other stuff. That’s all new.”
The boy nodded at me, and we once again lapsed into silence until I decided to speak. “Alright, listen, you get some sleep, alright? I know it's not much, but the floor is comfortable, kind of, and you can use my bag for a pillow. I'll get some food later, and then I’ll take you to the city to see if we can get you some help.”
The boy nodded at me once and began migrating away from the fire pit towards my pitiful little structure and laid himself down on the floor looking incredibly uncomfortable as he did.
I really need to get back to work on this place; I need those walls, and I need furnishing of some kind.
I watched Reggie fall, making sure nothing else was amiss within the woods that surrounded my home, before I stalked off into the forest intent on dealing with the dirtbag that masqueraded as the kid’s father and getting some food.
It took me no time to navigate my way through the forest and find the still passed-out man I’d beaten into the dirt. Staring down at the man filled me with a sense of disgust; a familiar anger forced its way to the front of my mind.
How fucking dare you come here, to my home, so you can chase down a child? You disgusting piece of shit.
The hatred that pulsed in my veins was always a sure thing whenever I came in contact with people, and it came much faster when they were in my home, yet I didn’t feel it towards Reggie; in fact, for some reason, his presence was entirely fine for me, even somewhat pleasant. I hadn’t realized how starved for conversation I was until I saw how willingly I entertained Reggie’s attempts at conversing, despite my usual dislike of children.
Kneeling down beside the man, I flexed my will and pulled on my core, which I could feel was once again flooded with the energy of death, as was the shade, who seemed to be wandering aimlessly and lost within the mists.
My tattoos faded into existence, overlaying my skin as thin mists of death billowed out of them softly and wrapped around my fingers. I pressed my hand against the man, and I felt and saw something flash over his unconscious form: a subtle orange light appeared to my mana sense before the black energy that coated my hand pushed against it and phased through.
I felt a strange sensation in my core, kind of like the sensation of feeling a glass being crushed in your hand, the strange feeling of energy and pressure building and releasing you get just before you hear the mug shatter and it breaks apart.
My energy pushed through the orange aura, and it flickered out moments later as I wrapped my fingers around the man’s neck, and the deathly fog began draining out of my core faster than ever as it soaked into the man.
As my energy entered him, I could feel it clashing with something else deeper inside him, his life force. I knew instinctually, and from the feeling, I was winning; my mana coursed through his veins, making them take on a blackish hue as it ate through his life, and I could see him beginning to pale, and the skin that surrounded his neck was wrinkling, and black necrotizing fingerprints were appearing over his throat, looking as though his neck had extremely advanced frostbite.
As my own energy won the war within him, consuming more and more of his life force, I could see the more natural, ephemeral form of death fading in from somewhere unknown to me and beginning to cover his form. Finally I felt his life shatter under the force of my mana like a marionette being cut from his strings; the energy in his form went limp and stopped fighting me.
My own mana began eating away at his energies, greedily consuming his life and everything else before wrapping around something small and flimsy in the center of his chest. It felt like… a core not unlike mine but smaller, weaker, and practically devoid of energy.
As I pulled on the core with my deathly energy, I felt something shift within me as red runes ignited themselves along my skin and thick black and red chains began flowing out of them. They were ethereal, not really there, just concentrated energy holding a shape, yet to me they felt real, and they were emanating malignant energy as they rushed forward and punched through the layer of death coating the man’s skin like it was paper and sunk into him, heading straight for his core.
The infernal chains seemed to almost have a mind of their own. I could feel that they would obey me if I really forced them to, that if I wanted to pull them back, I could; a soft mental tug confirmed that as they slowed down to my mental command.
I urged them forward, curious to see what this foreign, so far entirely incomprehensible, mana form wanted, and as it approached, the man’s pitiful core drowned in my death, the smoke parted for it, making small openings that the chains dove into. I felt them drilling into the core of energy, the strange, otherworldly vibrations reverberating up the chains and into my own core as they broke through, and I saw in my mind’s eye as they wrapped around something small that flickered like an ember of grayish-blue fire.
I began pulling back on my mana as I grew wary of how rapidly my core was emptying of mana; the mist that surrounded my own core was growing thin, and I could see links of the infernal chains shattering into metal powder and disintegrating.
When the energies pulled back, neither seemed willing to release their bounties; the mists of death dragged the man’s core out with him, and the chains ripped the ember of flame out with it. As my mana retreated back towards me, I felt my death mana hitching and catching against the natural mana of death, similar to when I first discovered the strange shade that I had swallowed.
Impatience flooded my mind seeing how every second I wasted my core’s energy was getting thinner and more dispersed. Attack, rip it apart. I screamed mentally as my mana-split, soft pieces of smoke wrapped around a core quickly turned into hundreds of thin tendrils that dug into, wrapped around, and pulled on the deathly energy until it seemed to snap, losing whatever fixtures were holding it together and to the corpse.
My own mana merged with it and pulled hard, tearing the core and shade back into my tattoos, and I could feel it screaming as my core was refilled with waves of death energy and a new shade.