“Ah, there you are, Thomas!” Miss Rose called out to me before I could escape, “I hope you have settled in fine, Thomas. I see that you have made friends with Matthew, which is good. Though you do seem to spend most of your time in the shooting range, and while I know it's good to practise your marksmanship, you shouldn’t let it take up all your time. It’s not healthy,” Miss Rose continued in a friendly, conversational way. “But it's a good thing I caught you, as I feel you’ve had long enough to settle in, so now it is time you started to help around the place; I want you to walk Drei around the fields.”
This is how it usually happens; they let you do what you want for the first week to get settled in (though for me, it was closer to the first month as I had been avoiding Miss Rose to get out of it) and then give you a chore that no one wants to do, ‘cause its cold and dark outside. Usually, it was taking the bins out, but apparently, this place had to have a dog. Why not a cat? You can just let a cat do whatever and only have to do something when its bowl is empty. But they had a dog, and I had to walk it.
“OK, I’ll walk the dog. Where is he?”I asked out of necessity.
“Drei is waiting by the door,” She told me, handing me his leash.
I sighed; I wasn’t getting out of this. Before I went out, I grabbed my headphones and hoodie from my room and hit shuffle on my music playlist. The sound of upbeat trumpets and guitar contrasting with the vocals filled my ears. I went downstairs and put the leash on Drei to the beat of the music. He vibrated with excitement at the prospect of a walk and stepped outside just as the chorus started. It was cloudy, cold, and misty; great weather for staying inside, and the dog seemingly agreed as he stubbornly tried to go back inside until we were a short distance away.
Drei dragged me along where I needed to go, past the shooting range and into the field next to Bluebell Forest. We followed the river that ran by the field. The bank had a brown division from mud to grass, a sign of the recent flooding. The ground around it looked mildly frosty and firm, which confirmed my decision to wear a hoodie.
***
I had realised that I had been walking for around fifteen minutes and decided that I should start heading back. My hands were beginning to regret the lack of gloves. Drei started acting up, barking at something in the distance as his ears turned. I turned down my music to see what was wrong with him. I thought I could hear some distant shouting over the tune and what I thought was an alarm.
I walked a bit off the path to get a closer look, and because I hadn’t been locking where I was going, I put my foot directly into a rabbit hole. I tripped, got my foot stuck, and cut it on a sharp rock.
I had wedged my foot deep into the hole and could not try to remove it from the hole without a wave of extra pain hitting me like a ton of bricks. All other thoughts were forgotten in the pain. I dropped Drei’s lead, and he ran off in the direction of the shouting, which was getting louder. My vision became tunnelled as the adrenaline kicked in, the shouting being swallowed by my attempts at dislodging my leg.
In that moment, I felt an energy pass throughout my body, emitting from the centre of my chest. It was as if I had just woken up. The pain was still there but fading gradually. I felt more powerful.
Then, without any warning, something hit me like ten rugby players at once. My leg felt like it had been ripped off, and the bone snapped in two. My jean leg felt like it was half blood, wet and sticky. The pain was several times what it was previously, and the feeling of power was gone.
I blacked out.
***
When I regained consciousness, I, somehow, was severely bruised on my chest, perfectly fine on my legs and had a bag over my head. There was the metallic taste of blood in my mouth from when I had bit my tongue in the struggle, it wasn’t a new taste but it was still noticeable as I could feel where cut was when I moved my tongue. The feeling of humidity was strange, unlike how Turgida ever felt even in summer, and the bird song sounded off. I was dragged and then tied into a chair. The bag was taken off my head.
I winced as my eyes adapted to the sudden light change. The previously muffled birds became clearer. A man who I’d never seen before but somehow recognised was speaking, but his voice was weird. I could hear the words coming out of his mouth but could not make out what he was saying, though I could work out the occasional fractured sentence.
“Did he really think that he could sneak one of his students… don’t even know your legacy… I’m insulted.”
The man was, for some reason, difficult to describe even though I was staring right at him. I think he had maroon eyes and was moderately tall. Whenever I tried to look anywhere other than his face, it became hazy and unfocused, like I couldn’t see anything other than baseline aspects. One thing I did know about him was that I did not like him.
“Now I’ve more important things to work on other than to punish some student,” the maroon-eyed man said, this time more clearly as being straight up dismissed without much thought stung my ego.
He left the room saying something which may have been some kind of one-liner. It was then I noticed that I was not the only person in the room; the people who I believe dragged me in had not left during the conversation as I had thought they had. There were two of them. That much was clear, but it was like they occasionally swapped sides without me noticing. One of the goons was a woman with pink eyes and a scar running under them, the other was a man with yellow eyes and freckles; he also had some of his teeth knocked out when I was struggling and his gums were bleeding.
He grinned, clicking his neck. He punched me around three or four times in the face and one shot in the groin. Then he kicked me in the chest, almost knocking the chair over, only for it to be caught by the pink-eyed woman. She spun me ‘round, punching in the same places as the man had kicked me, and pulled her fist back to hit me in the face again. I turned my face away, closing my eyes in anticipation. Only four seconds later, I realised that the punch still had not hit me. I opened my eyes.
The woman was seemingly frozen in place, mere inches away from my face. Not only that, but everything had just stopped. I could not hear the birds outside anymore. The man was standing almost motionless, cracking his knuckles while giving me a bloody psychotic grin. I felt stronger and more powerful, and my injuries had practically healed somehow. Something had clicked inside me. I felt like someone else and me at the same time. It was right and incorrect. It was strange.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
“Now, how am I going to get out of these ropes?”
I noticed that the woman, who was still in the middle of punching me, had a knife attached to her waist, so I inched the chair closer to her until the knife was right where I needed it to be, although the reflection in the metal didn’t look right. The woman’s pink eyes slowly followed where I previously was, widening as her body weight followed through with the punch into the empty air where I once was a second ago. The man was also starting to look shocked, reacting in slow motion but slowly accelerating as my aura was depleting. I needed to hurry up. I cut the rope with the woman’s knife, sawing between my wrists and accidentally cutting the side of my arm before I freed myself.
I staggered to my feet, spitting blood at my attackers as they slowly turned to face me and ran out of the building, dodging random people who were in my way, ignoring what I'm pretty sure were cracked ribs, and when the ship I somehow knew should have been there wasn’t, I just kept running. I didn’t stop until I physically couldn’t run any longer. I collapsed near a village I did not recognise, time returning to normal just before I blacked out.
***
Beep, beep, beep.
I opened my eyes to the robotic sound of my heart beating in a constant rhythm. I seemed to be in one of the local hospitals, which was near the orphanage. How did I get here, and what the hell was that thing I just witnessed? I still sort of felt the power of the… dream. Yeah, a dream. What was that?
I rubbed my wrists to make sure they were unharmed; I still could remember the ropes tied around them.
I should have been bruised, but I wasn’t. My leg felt peculiar, as if it weren’t there. It didn’t make any sense. Other than my leg, I felt perfectly fine, though a bit groggy. The grogginess was most likely because of some anaesthetic the doctors gave me while I was out.
“Great, you’re up,” an unknown voice said with annoyance. You’ve been unconscious for the last three days. The police were able to notify your guardians due to the chip on that dog you were with. You should maybe thank it the next time you see it, as otherwise that would have put way more stress on them, and you know what stress brings.”
I sat up to see where the voice was coming from. There was no one else in the room. What did they give me that would make me hear voices? I looked again to convince myself that the medication was just making me slightly mad, and the thing I thought I heard talking wasn't real, but it didn’t go away.
An impossible figure sat on a chair, his legs resting on another. He was wearing armour made from a strange crystal-like material I did not recognise. His body and clothing had clocks scattered on them, all running at different times and speeds. Not only that, his body and clothing were only one colour: fire red. Even his skin and hair burned the same, glowing slightly. It was as if he was made from static flames. The only exception to this fire red rule were his eyes, which were pure white.
“Who the fuck are you?” I exclaimed, surprised also by the coarse sound of my voice. Though, I had the faintest feeling that I recognised him. The beeping monitor sped up slightly.
“I guess we haven’t been formally introduced. I’m the asshole whose soul decided it wanted to join yours. I am–”
“Wait, you’re Reacher!” I interrupted, the realisation clicking as I recognised the voice and the colour of his eyes from the news broadcast of the robbery I remember seeing; how I remembered that, I don’t know.
“I see I’ve got a fan.” Edward carried on, slightly annoyed at the interruption. “My real name is Edward Blitz, but most know me as Reacher as you do. As for that thing you experienced, that was my most memorable memory. I am assuming that you went through a similar thing as I did for yours: blue blurs and car crashes. That wasn’t me if you were wondering.”
“I thought your Legacy was super speed, not time manipulation. Also, how or maybe why are you here, and why do you look like that?” I asked, wanting answers.
“Well, you see…I have no idea. It may have something to do with me colliding with you, which joined our souls together because your Legacy was just unlocked, other than that – no clue. What I do know is that only you can hear me or even see me, so you’d better stop talking to yourself. As for why I look like this, I believe that this is just what my soul looks like; something to do with my ‘time manipulation’ Legacy. Also, it looks like someone wants to see you.”
As if on cue, I heard a knock at the door. A stone-faced man who looked about thirty opened the door slightly and requested to come in. He had hazelnut eyes that seemed older than he was. He had the build of a warrior, tall and broad. He was wearing a casual suit that looked uncomfortably hot for the hospital room. A heavy aura of power radiated off him; this wasn’t any normal person.
“Evening Mr Walker, my name is Charon Washington, and as you may be aware I am the headmaster of Telum, this kingdom's largest and most influential training school. We train the next generation of powerful Mythics to protect humanity’s bright flame from being extinguished by the soulless darkness which seeks to destroy us. May I ask who you were talking to just now? I was under the impression I was the first to see you after you had awakened.” Washington queried, his eyes seemed to keep flickering towards something on my face as he was talking.
“Well, I was – I was talking to… myself?” It was sort of the truth, kind of.
Edward shrugged. “You’re probably not wrong, but you’re also not right.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said back to Edward in my head. I assume he heard me as he shrugged again.
“It’s strange, but you get that with a lot of Mythics that have just unlocked their legacy,” Washington said, “Anyway, you may be wondering why I am here personally asking you to come to my school. Well, you see, at my school, we have many Mythics we train and teach, almost all of which have attended another training school like Bellum. Most of them are powerful, but judging from the raw energy radiating off you, you are on another level, even without training.”
With the mention of raw energy, I sat up slightly higher. “What do you mean 'raw energy', also, my legacy? I thought I only unlocked my aura?”
“Historically, they coincide with each other before we worked out a less traumatic way of activating them, though the system apparently missed you. It must have been around the time of the blackout that yours was supposed to have been activated, for that I deeply apologise, my condolences about your mother.”
“Thanks, but the raw energy?”
“Ah yes, you may have noticed that the lights in here are brighter than you would expect. They passively run on loose aura, which is incredibly useful as the general population only has weak aura control, so the ambient aura that flows off them is enough to charge them. Yours is currently overloading them. My school will help with that and allow you to amplify that rejuvenating effect you likely feeling now your aura is flowing more freely.”
There is only one other person I have met who I believe is as powerful without training, and he didn’t accept my invitation to Telum Academy. I want you to change his mind; I believe you’ve met. His name is Matthew Hunter.”