JUNE 17th, 2014.
Seth heaves, fully standing up and continuing to stare at Vain, who slowly approaches him.
Vain shrugs his shoulders, holding his hands out to his side, level with them with a smug look on his face.
“Was 400 a little too much for you?” he asks Seth, with a mocking smile and a sarcastic tone of voice. “See... I’ve got a problem with overcompensating.”
Seth leaps for his pistol that lies in front and to the right of him on the ground, only slightly covered by the doorframe from Vain’s perspective. Grabbing it and using his momentum to roll over, he turns toward Vain at a breakneck pace and fires two rounds at his head.
“Utilize. 15 milliliters.”
The two bullets land directly against his cheek and next to his mouth, shattering against his face and sending flying minuscule shards of metal around him. As the shards fall away from his face, hardened small dots of blood are visible under where each bullet had hit. Seth watches the shards fall onto the ground in shock, scattering before his feet as if they were originally made of fine, fragile glass.
I thought those had hit. Did I miss? No… that’s not it.
“Embody. 45 millimeters.” Vain cuts him off, staring down at him.
After he says this, tiny spikes of blood, the diameter of which is identical to the wounds he sustained on his face, extend all the way from where he stands to pierce Seth’s shoulders against the wall behind him, effortlessly passing through his body and pinning him there. Seth winces in pain as it feels like two small needles just shot through his body, as he slams the side of his pistol against them, breaking them off. They remained lodged in his shoulders, still stabbed into the wall behind him. He raises his gun to fire out of instinct but realizes just before he pulls the trigger that he’d only be worsening his situation.
Vain notices his realization, and cocks his head, laughing at Seth. He can’t get enough of seeing Seth out of breath, blood running down his head as he aggressively stares at him.
“Quick on your feet, huh? You got me!” he sarcastically frowns, dropping his head down menacingly. “All my tricks are exposed…”
He rushes at Seth at full speed, slamming his right fist forward as Seth barely dodges off to the left, while Vain sends the punch straight into the wall that was behind his head, creating a large indent.
“...Not.”
Before Seth can regain his balance, Vain kicks the right of his abdomen and slams him against the wall on the opposite side, next to the damaged apartment’s door. Clutching his stomach and coughing out blood, Seth leans against the side of the wall as if he’d fall over if it wasn’t there. Inside, the mother is clutching to the child, holding his head, and trying to calm him down as she’s too scared to move her legs and escape. Vain steps toward Seth, each step becoming weightier to reflect his disappointment.
“Huh… you’re weaker than I thought you’d be. You are our Progenitor, yeah?”
Seth struggles to look up at Vain, let alone answer him, as his vision blurs and his ears are buzzing uncontrollably. He’s completely out of it.
Just then, the child begins crying while his mother desperately tries to quiet him down by holding him tightly. Vain’s eyes dart over to the doorway, slowly turning his head to face it.
“No…” Seth barely spits out, weakly grabbing at his ankle as he takes a single step toward the door. Vain looks down at him, barely acknowledging him as he smugly kicks his hand away.
After his death... I promised I wouldn’t kill another…
And that I would never… let anyone in front of me die again…
“Huh? Oh… I get it.” Vain says, hitting his left flat-faced palm with his right fist in a “eureka”-type fashion, showing Seth the wide grin he despises. “You’re holding yourself back because of those two…”
He drops the grin, walking toward the mother and child with a deadpan stare, very little emotion shown through his calmly psychopathic eyes.
Right now, he despises the two of them more than anything else in the world.
That if I could stop it... if I could protect someone…
Seth watches, helplessly fallen over onto his side, as Vain aggressively grips a large handful of hair belonging to the top of the mother’s scalp, dragging her on her knees from the middle of their living room toward the balcony further into the apartment as she lets go of her child.
“N-no…! Please! Please just let me go!” she begs, trying to release his grip on her hair. She attempts to grab onto the arm of the couch, then onto a fallen-over coffee table, but Vain doesn’t let up.
And yet… this man in front of me…
Seth painfully crawls forward while gritting his teeth, pushing his fingertips against the harsh wooden floor of the apartment, feeling every groove as a reminder of the futile distance he’s making with his body in the state it's in.
“Let… her... go…!” Seth barely manages to cough out the words as Vain continues to angrily pull the woman to the edge of the balcony, holding her by the back of her shirt as he quickly forces her head front first over the railing. The rain outside falls on both of them, drenching their clothes.
…Is going to murder someone… because I exist.
“NO! NOOO! STOP THIS! PLEASE!” she pleads, as Vain shows his signature disturbingly vile smug grin, holding her in place as she looks down at the sickeningly long distance to the ground in horror.
If I could… just kill him…
As the woman continues to scream in fear from having her head pushed down over the railing further and further, Vain looks over his right shoulder back at the kid, who’s staring at him in frozen horror.
“Do you know what angels are, little boy?” he asks, with a mocking smirk and a cocked eyebrow.
If I had... that ability...
The child slowly nods in response, tears quietly forming in the recesses of his eyes.
“Good…” Vain replies, grabbing the back of the boy’s mother’s shirt, and slowly lifting her upward and further over the railing.
Right now… In this moment, I...
“...When you grow up, blame this on a cruel God.”
Vain brings her up over the edge of the railing, throwing her off without an ounce of care. She stares at the ground, falling just as fast as the rain around her, knowing that she’s going to hit it. That she’s going to die. Her screams cause the making of Seth’s blood to curl, and his skin to shiver in a way he had almost forgotten it could. He could only stare at the back of the child’s head, unmoving as he slowly raised his hand up without moving his body, unable to deduct where his mother had disappeared to. Suddenly, her screams stopped.
Her body had hit the pavement.
Seth’s eyes were open wide, though he couldn’t feel anything belonging to his own body. The only thing he felt at that moment was a burning hellfire inside of him, as Vain’s actions doused the entirety of his soul in gasoline. It burned brighter than the sun, and then charred away, forming a hard black crust over it. Seth screamed in anguish as it happened as if he was going mad, while he slammed his forehead against the floor. The pain of his self-inflicted injury wasn’t felt, and the soreness of his vocal cords was lost to a feeling that was indescribably worse than any physical pain he had ever experienced.
…I would throw everything away.
Just to kill this man in front of me.
Anything. I would give anything.
This world is a cruel, disgusting place.
It doesn’t change. It just gets worse.
Humans are just…
Before he could finish that strain of thought, and before he ripped his vocal cords from his endless screaming, information he’d never heard nor known about before entered his mind like a snake slithering in through his ear and coiling around his brain. It caused an intense sharp pain which he winced at, but then it was over.
But it kept repeating, over, and over, and over, and over, and over again.
Somewhere in Seth’s mind, or his soul, he knew what it meant.
Why it was there.
It even felt familiar to him, somehow, as if he’d known it for his entire life.
Beginning to part his dry and bloody cracked lips, he scrapes his fingertips against the ground, pushing against the floor of the apartment with all of his strength as he grits his teeth so hard he feels as if he’ll shatter them. Vain stands on the balcony, staring wide-eyed with an excited expression. He had gotten what he wanted.
“I call to thee… O’ forsaken World Tree. Hear my words, and protect me…” Seth slowly begins to recite the words that had forced themselves into his mind through gritted teeth, with a scratchy and coarse, incredibly pained voice.
He looks up at Vain, dead in his eyes, force-feeding all of the hatred and anger he feels for him in that moment directly into his soul. It causes Vain to open his eyes even wider, smiling even harder as his fingers tense up and erratically convulse, which pisses Seth off even more.
“...For time is a game, and it deserves to be played.”
As soon as Seth had finished uttering the last word, wind began to swirl around his feet, knocking loose objects around in the apartment. The little boy quickly backed away, hiding near a corner.
The wind rose both in height and intensity, as it covered Seth’s entire body while an aqua-green light started to emanate from it. Vain still stood on the balcony, watching in awe and excitement.
He couldn’t see the sharp, jutted spines that looked like broken pieces of light, greyish-teal metal as they tore themselves from the flesh above Seth’s spine. There was no blood, though Seth’s nerves fired off as his brain was convinced it had experienced brutal pains.
Large bio-organic plates of armor that seemed like a mix of scales, bones, and flesh, made their way across Seth’s back, up his arms, and down his legs, snapping together and securing themselves around his limbs as they extended, with additional plates being revealed under their previous counterparts.
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The shape of his silhouette had begun to shift into something much more monstrous, as the plates shifted past his legs, extending what were functionally his limbs. The same had continued with his arms, expanding them as they were encased by the living armor that covered them.
The plates of armor continued to cover his torso, as a large breastplate connected itself that came from his shoulders. Its color was a darker grey compared to the rest of the body as if it belonged to the underside of a reptile. Those spines had continued to jut out of Seth’s back as this transformation had taken place, crowding themselves around his spine.
Seth had closed his eyes before the transformation began, accepting whatever was happening to him. After the spines stopped appearing, a split jaw containing the bottom row of teeth that looked more like broken iron spikes than bone, attached together in front of Seth’s mouth as layered neck scales began to slide down from the gaps on the bottom, attaching themselves to the shoulder and chest plates. Finally, a rounded but similarly armored head and top set of teeth, with four sets of closed eyes symmetrically placed across the face, and an embedded hourglass inside of his forehead with its own respective “socket”, clasped down on top of the bottom set of teeth with a loud, almost mechanic sounding chomp.
The light began to dissipate first, as Vain received his first proper look at what had become Seth’s silhouette.
It was around half a meter taller than Seth, with monstrous proportions.
His fingers had toes had grown razor-sharp, bony claws at the end of each of them.
The arms and legs appeared muscular, but sharp.
Sharp bones were jutting outwards from both the elbows and knees, appearing as if they were blades.
The jagged spines near the back looked like a row of bent knives had stabbed their way out of the thing’s back.
All of this was accompanied by a lined, ominous aqua-green glow that coiled itself around the entire body, inside of the indentations between where the plates connected.
As the wind that covered its body disappeared, the thing that Seth had become began to open its eyes, each of them appearing animalistic with black slits for pupils. They looked around, independently of one another, as they searched the apartment for Vain.
They found him within a second’s worth of time, their pupils expanding as they came into contact with his face.
“You…” A raspy, distorted, and growling voice came from behind the teeth.
As soon as their eyes met his, Vain noticed something that caused his eyes to widen in fear as his eyebrows raised in horror.
“That’s…? No, no, no… You’re…” Vain began to say, trailing off as he couldn’t think straight from the fear that had frozen his body.
He was staring at a tilted, circular aqua-green halo that began to form over the top right side of Seth’s “head”. It was styled like the face of a clock, with Roman numerals counting on each side of it. Underneath it was another glowing layer, albeit dimmer, this time styled as gears moving to represent the inner workings of a clock. The hour and minute hands were placed to the north, on “XII”, as they began to make a full rotation.
Vain inches himself backward, pressing against the edge of the balcony’s railing, looking as if he were staring at the devil itself. Realizing he has nowhere to run, he clenches his teeth toward Seth’s new appearance in an act of misplaced defiance.
“Take! 2000 milliliters!” he quickly yells, slamming his arms crossed in front of him in an X position as “Seth” begins to rush toward him, animalistically growling at him.
A bony fist impacts against Vain’s arms, pushing them into his chest as if he had just been hit by an eighteen-wheeler going 116 kilometers per hour. He’s launched away from the balcony, into the air above the street next to the apartment and being hurtled even further past it. Seth crouches down, tensing up his new form as his feet dig into the concrete of the balcony, before leaping toward Vain as fast as a bullet, grabbing his ankle and throwing him back toward the apartment complex. He crashes through the second floor, coughing up blood and exerting in pain, before breaking through it and landing in an apartment’s master bedroom on the first floor.
Seth’s “eyes” open widely as if they’re excited, as he stops his forward momentum against the side of another building, launching back toward the hole that Vain had left in the apartment complex.
Vain struggles to push himself up as he presses his bleeding arm against a large pool of blood on the ground in front of him, gritting his teeth.
“Embody! 3000 milliliters!”
A gigantic spike made of hardened blood erupts from the pool, sending itself hurtling through the hole that Seth was just outside of. Seth’s spiky teeth open wide to show a long tongue hanging out as he looks thrilled by the attack, grabbing the outside of the blood spike while barely dodging it, twisting his torso around as his forward momentum causes sparks to fly. He hangs onto it, using it to slide through the damaged apartment complex. As soon as he reaches the first floor, he punches through the left side of the spike, sending a piece of it hurling toward Vain. He jumps out of the way, dodging it by only a few centimeters as it crushes everything on one side of the room, breaking part of the back wall and allowing the dim greenish-grey light from outside to glare in.
Seth follows the attack up with another rush toward Vain, this time impacting his fist against his stomach, punching fast enough to push his entire body upward as his back slams against the ceiling, leaving a large indent, and blood pours from his mouth.
“T-ta—” Vain struggles to speak before Seth grabs him by the front of his jacket and throws him against the damaged piece of the blood spike, crashing him through the wall and onto the two-lane street just outside the complex. Vain’s body skips across the asphalt into traffic, hitting the front of an SUV and damaging the entire engine bay as it spins out toward the sidewalk on the other side of the street.
“‘T-take’... ‘t-take’... all you know is…”
Seth slowly and erratically steps outside across the rubble, struggling to get a feel for his new body. He stares forward as Vain’s body lies in the indent of the SUV, smiling at his work as his eyes dip with sadistic pleasure.
This wasn’t Seth.
“‘Take’... I will…”
He leaps forward, landing next to the SUV and leaning over Vain with a wide smile just to taunt him. The driver was knocked unconscious by the crash, with their head hung down in front of them.
“...Take everything from you.”
Vain, with his head tilted backward against the bent hood of the car, shows a confident smile through bloody teeth.
“...Ignite. 9270 millimeters.”
Seth hadn’t noticed that his previous attack caused one of the tanks to leak, which had spread all across the road and around the car Vain had hit. Within an instant, Vain was launched upward by a white-hot explosion that engulfed both Seth and the car, as well as the entire sidewalk and half of the road they were near. Above him, Vain bit into the top of his right hand, ripping the skin off of his knuckles and pointing the arm below him directly at Seth, while bracing it with his opposite arm.
“EMBODY! 1500 MILLIMETERS!” Vain desperately yells, as a collection of twelve tentacle-esque thorned spikes slithers downward, as fast as a shot from a railgun, piercing through Seth, roaring loudly in pain. The spikes root themselves into Seth and suspend Vain in the air. Seth, still roaring in pain, struggles before opening his jaw wide.
During his earlier transformation, another set of information had entered his brain. The words started to scream themselves to him internally, mixing with the sound of his roaring, as if pleading for him to recite them.
That it would solve everything, and end the pain he was experiencing.
And so, he began to.
“Gods… fear none but time. For infinite beings, regret is… the annihilator…” Seth uttered in an even raspier, pained voice.
“What are you…?! Get.. off!”
Vain tries to move his arm away, to break the spikes off, but neither budge. He slams his fist against them, but they don’t shatter. The trap he believed to have caught Seth in had become his own.
Seth held a single index finger out, as a black mass that reversed the colors of whatever was seen through it began to pulse directly above it, as if it was a living thing. It consumed the air close to it, creating a small halo-shaped vacuum. Slowly, it begins to swirl, picking up more speed as it does.
Seth tilts his head upward, as the rain pours against his bloodied sharp teeth, and the sets of eyes look angrily up at the heavens, as if they were cursing them.
“Irony presents itself… in that humans strive to control the clock…” He trails off, looking over at Vain with a stare of pure hatred. His eyelids shift downward in anger, as Vain stares helplessly while striking the hardened blood spikes once more. They finally break, and he falls to the ground.
“Take! 100 millimeters!” he shouts, before his legs impact against the surface. He looks much paler than he had earlier, a sign of continuous blood loss and transfusion making itself evident.
Bright orange and purple wisps of energy begin forming, swirling around the black mass above Seth’s fingertip as they become faster and faster, relative to the rotation speed of the mass itself.
“Kerr held the keys… and grief unlocked the door...”
Vain looked on in horror for only a moment before grabbing the remaining tank of blood that was strapped on his back, bringing it forward, and shoving it with both arms in front of him, with the IV still attached to his forearm.
This was his last resort.
Seth nonchalantly points his index finger, with the mass following above it, toward Vain.
“EMBODY! 7670 MILLILITERS!” Vain yelled, as a thick wall of hardened blood erupted from the canister in front of him, as he fell backward behind it.
Seth tilts his head to the side, realizing the futility of his action.
“...Advent Horizon.”
At the very moment the mass began to speed forward on its own, every sound in the surrounding area was devoured. The fire crackling around Seth from the earlier ignited blood, his low growls, Vain’s yelling as he saw his life flash behind his eyes.
None of it was able to be heard.
As the mass moved forward, small cracks in the space around it followed its path. They were bright white in color, and if someone could have walked around them, they would have remained in the same position regardless of the viewer’s angle.
As it began to touch the edge of the blood wall Vain had erected to defend him, it did not destroy, crush, or even obliterate it.
Everything that came close to it was simply erased.
As if it was never there to begin with, as if God took an eraser to his canvas and wiped it away.
Vain had sealed his fate the moment he ignited the remaining blood in the first canister. Despite there being a leak, there was most likely a more resourceful way that he could’ve used it.
That is what he thought as he saw the mass pass through the internal side of the wall, staring directly at it.
For the first time in his life, Vain, titled the Sin of Pride in Seraphim’s ranks…
...Had known not only defeat, but also regret.
“Nullification.”
The word pierces through the area like a cannon, as the mass, and the wall of blood Vain had created, both instantly disappear. A blonde woman with long hair, wearing a pure white suit slid into the scene in front of Vain, disappearing with him as soon as she had appeared. The only other detail Seth caught in the moment was that she seemingly wore a black eyepatch over her left eye.
“Sera. Restrain.”
Yasu’s calm but emphasized voice came from behind Seth, a few meters away from the car he was next to, as he turned to see where it originated from. Before he could react, heavy chains had manifested from the ground, clasping themselves around his arms and legs as Kat rushed toward him with large gauntlets around her forearms that looked like thick gravestones. She leaned her right shoulder into a hard punch to his stomach, causing his jaw to slack as his tongue shot out of his mouth, his eyes wincing from the attack.
Just then, the last grain of sand belonging to the hourglass in Seth’s forehead had reached the bottom. Nobody had noticed it was there due to the intensity of the situation, not even Vain previously.
The halo above Seth’s head faded away until it was completely gone, as the plates of armor stacked against each other, began to recede from where they had come from. The spines that jutted from Seth’s back began to push themselves inward, back into his body, as well. As the secondary head moved backward over the top of Seth’s human head, Kat noticed that he was currently unconscious.
“Hey, Yasu…?” Kat begins to say, sounding very confused. “There’s no way in hell I killed him, right...?”
“He’s unconscious,” Yasu retorts, looking unimpressed, “typical for someone going through their first synchronization.”
“This guy… synchronized with a god?” Kat questions, still confused as her gravestone gauntlets begin to crumble away and dissipate into the air, catching Seth in her arms. “What could a human desire that even comes close to a Numet-class’s wants…?”
“Guess that’s why Liam told us to bring him in.”
“Eh...? Seriously? Do we even have restraints on us?!”
Yasu stares at Seth’s unconscious body, as Kat lays him on the asphalt. The fire had burned the surface, causing an even blacker appearance than usual.
“He won’t do anything,” he says, confidently.
“Are you sure of that?” Kat cocks her eyebrow at him, not believing what she’s hearing.
“It’s an experienced hunch. Something you don’t have yet,” Yasu retorts, staring at her, while pointing down the road at their parked sedan. “Now shut it, and put him in the car.”
Kat stares at him for a moment, bewildered by his confidence, before sighing with her eyes closed.
“Whatever you say…” she trails off, crouching down to pick up Seth as the two of them head back to their car. She looks down at him, peacefully knocked out.
What is… with you? You looked so evil earlier, now you’re just… napping?
She sighs again, opening the back right side car door and placing his body inside, while tying his wrists up with the two available seat belts, suspending his forearms in the air as his head hangs down with zero resistance.
Then again… we always get the weird ones. Even for signers.
She closes the back side door, opens the passenger seat door, and places herself inside as Yasu turns on the ignition.