V – 00002.9 – To The Bitter End.

The soldiers barely even responded to my words, their eyes flicked to the boy and then slid up to my claws and back to my face, I watched them thumb the safety of their guns; and they repeated their previous commands in a louder more aggressive tone.

“I don’t have any fucking weapons you troglodyte” I shouted back, and they seemed to take exception to this, I watched their fingers shift off their trigger guard to the lever that would spell my doom and likely the end of the kid behind me.

My mind raced through different ideas of how to handle this, how I could possibly de-escalate the situation as adrenaline started to fill my veins my body readying itself having already arrived at the conclusion I was refusing to accept.

The soldiers shouted at me again telling me to disarm myself and get on my knees, and that’s the moment I strained my adrenal vault for everything it had recovered since my last fight, I felt my heart hammer as time seemed to slow down. My vision blurred into narrow red slits as I exploded forwards at the armed thugs before me; a subtle hope remained in the back of my mind that I’d move far enough before they started shooting that Reggie wouldn’t be caught in the cross fire.

I had barely moved a few meters when I heard the first clicks on their triggers, I watched from my distorted sense of time as the chambers on their rifles slid back and a boom slammed into my ears.

A massive force hammered into my shoulder and gut almost stopping me dead in my tracks as my momentum was arrested, three more explosions left the barrels of the soldiers guns as I continued sprinting bullets tearing into and out of my body until my outstretched hands found purchase on two heads and they were ripped off their feet and forced to follow me as I continued my sprint now holding the two grown men in each arm by the skull.

I slammed them into the chain link fence as hard as I could, which I was terrifyingly aware wasn’t very hard, I was growing weaker and weaker as I spilled a river of red.

The pain was distant and numb, as I raised the soldiers up high and slammed them into the ground driving my weight into the maneuver I felt a sick crunch reverberate up through my fingertips as the backs of their skull came into contact with the concrete. And looking down I could see splatters of blood and brain matter sticking to the floor, and a knife buried almost to the hilt in my thigh.

More are coming, Viktor. A voice in my head warned me distantly through the haze and incredible fatigue. I let go of the soldiers heads and stood up swaying drunkenly as I did mists of death began to crawl up my feet clinging to what I now knew was my spirit.

I turned and staggered towards Reggie, he looked terrified his eyes wide, hands covering his ears as he stared at me.

I stumbled towards him struggling to maintain my footing under the extreme dizziness and black spots that were starting to fill my vision and I mumbled as I limped past him. “You don’t know me… remember where I am if you need help.” My words spilled out of my lips in slurred whispers that I just hoped Reggie would understand.

Slowly retreating from the scene the adrenaline started fading from me, the burning cold pain became real again, and I struggled to use my barely functioning mind to pull on the ice aspect of my hardly regenerated death mana, directing it into my wounds the blood that was pouring out of me crystalized and froze just enough to stop my blood loss.

A soft and miserable chuckle escaped my lips along with strings of viscous red saliva. “So this is how it ends… Viktor dies saving a child” I croaked out. “That’s not so bad.”

I pushed myself for as long as I could dragging my ruined dying body down narrow streets and trying to avoid the sounds of people searching for me. Finally enough was enough, I fell to a knee, my prodigious strength at last deciding it had served me long enough.

Falling onto my hands, the last sight I saw before it all went black was two faceless humanoid shadows staring down at me dispassionately, their bodies seeming to ebb and flow into themselves constantly.

Finally were my last thoughts.

Lost in darkness I stared forward seeing nothing, no silver gates or assholes with clipboards, no fire and brimstone just vacant dread inducing nothingness, rooted in place I stared at this personal purgatory.

Eons seemed to pass me by as I stared endlessly forward, my mind absolutely empty, tormented by the lack of sensation until finally pain found me like a predator hiding in the dark.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

Pain lanced into my chest, and for a moment I found the sensation blessed until it grew from a stabbing sensation into full blown impalement on a flaming spear, more sensations came to join the pain, weakness, fatigue and a tugging on my chest like something was trying to pull me by the invisible dagger of agony in my center.

I felt myself twisting in the inky black until I was face to face with… myself a mutilated twisted version of myself I could barely recognize; his skin was ashen with the pallor of death, every inch of him was coated in dark blood, bullet holes in his limbs, stomach and chest, that let me see into and through him, with massive exit wounds as if his flesh had exploded away.

And in the dead center of his chest I could see a glowing darkness that writhed underneath his skin, a long thick tendril of black stretched out of the archaic tattoo over his sternum and into my own, my eyes wandered downwards to see a translucent version of myself made entirely of black smoke, with a tiny flickering teal flame inside.

And spreading out from my deformed body was a string of massive tentacles of darkness that seemed to stretch infinitely outwards and in the far reaches of purgatory.

Beyond the darkness two massive flickering orbs of glowing teal energy seemed to stare into my soul, and once I took notice of them they started growing bigger and bigger, approaching me at horrifying speed.

Their advance was soundless but with every inch they covered I felt the energies of death thickening, until finally the orbs were larger than buildings and I realized what I was looking at.

Ginormous glowing eyes stared down at me set into a draconic head peering down over its monstrous snout, the scales that adorned the creature were a mesmerizing black that undulated and shifted like the energies of death forming into different scale patterns, in constant flux, and distantly I could see massive ivory bone wings spread so large I couldn’t see where they ended. The beast before me was of truly incomprehensible scale, looking as though it could swallow the twin towers without chewing once.

It raised a massive scaled arm and stretched it out across the incredible distance between us, with its claws stopping mere meters from me, and just looking at this thing’s hand made me feel insignificant. The difference between me and one of its claws was the difference between Andre the giant and an ant.

The creature’s lips peeled back revealing its massive teeth and it spoke, its voice was soft and low but with every word that hit me, I felt an immeasurable tide of death energy slam into me, hitting my spirit so hard it felt like a physical impact that drove me away from my own corpse.

“I have been expecting you. Oh child of mine, you have been far too reckless, even with my power coursing through you. It brings me no pleasure to say, your next inheritance is one of pain.”

I stared at the massive dragon, my mind still reeling somewhat, attempting to get a grasp on the situation before me, which wasn’t aided by the fact that my internal monologue was completely mute, I could feel myself reacting and thinking, but hadn’t a single idea what was happening inside my mind.

“For the graceless such as us, returning is no simple matter.” As the dragon spoke to me I felt my skin burning as new tattoos appeared surrounding the ones set over my core they resembled massive fangs, with blood drooling off them and onto my core, or perhaps being drawn away from it.

“Child of mine from this day onwards you will know the voracity of death; I levy unto you one of the 13 curses of Ygdragthul the cursed.” The voice sounded mournful as it spoke, the sound it made was terrifying and totally foreign to any emotion, yet somehow the tone left me with a deep and terrible melancholy.

I watched the monsters claw disappear into the blackness of the void as a tendril of darkness attaching me to my body thickened and the fangs surrounding my core tattoo flashed a bright teal glow suddenly I was torn from the darkness and thrown into my body.

When I tried to look this time I felt my eyeballs moving in my head, as I stared at the darkness.

straining the muscles in my face I forced my heavy eyelids open and saw looking down at me, two faceless shadows both of them were kneeling over me their misty hands pressing hard against my skin putting pressure on my ripped open wounds.

“What the fresh fuck…” I muttered almost startling myself that I could speak and hear my own thoughts, which felt uncharacteristically quiet. As the clockwork in my head started to grind back into action I could feel a horrific migraine joining the numb cold agony that filled my body, everything in my mind was a mess and all at once it felt like recent events caught up with me as I really took note of where I was.

I was on a rooftop, barely illuminated by starlight with two shadow monsters trying to hold my insides, inside me. A vague memory hit me of the moment just before… I died. That… that wasn’t a dream was it, I was dead and that thing made me comeback. I stared forwards for a few moments processing the fact that I really had died and somehow that monster… No my legacy resurrected me back into my destroyed body.

I flexed my mind feeling my headache intensify as I searched my core which was absolutely overfilled with black smoke, then I found what I was looking for, the shades were gone from my core, somehow they had known I was dying and tried to rescue me, dragged me out of the gutter to somewhere I wouldn’t be found.

I looked up at the faces vacant creatures that were still trying to hold my wounds closed as if that was going to do anything. Note to self, not the brightest. “Thank you for umm moving my body I guess.”

The shades heads twisted to me as I started speaking to them but they seemed completely vacant mentally at the very least if they understood that I was thanking them, or even understood English they didn’t show it in any way shape or form.

I need to get the fuck out of here I thought as I attempted to sit up only to not move in the slightest, I didn’t even feel the muscles in my body try to flex or work with me. “You’re fucking with me right… I got brought back from the fucking dead for the privilege of starving to death on a fucking office building roof”

“Hey… can you hear me” I said to the shades kneeling before me and nothing not even a jerk of their heads.

“Come on I need you to get me out of the city.”

As soon as I said that however there was an instant response. They stopped trying to tend to my wounds, one of them grabbed my shoulders and the other grabbed my legs and they heaved me up into the air, although looking at how unstable the energies in them seemed to be as they took on my weight I was beginning to get seriously worried about how the hell they were going to move me out of the city.

“I swear to fuck if anyone witnesses this I will hunt them down and kill him.”