The mayor took an unsteady step towards me, his facial muscles flicking between emotions so fast it looked like he’d developed a twitch.

Much to my surprise, Trinadelle placed himself between me and the freak show. His rapier was held aloft, the tip steady as he moved it in a slow figure eight in the air.

“Mayor Hoe, I ask that you stand down. Do not approach the Champion. I think you are sick and may need a healer.”

“Yeah, Trinadelle, that ain’t the mayor,” I said. “I’m pretty sure someone’s controlling the mayor. Like a puppet.”

“Be that as it may, I ask the person in front of me to stand down! Now!”

The mayor stopped so suddenly his body swayed like a drunken sailor. One arm rose slowly to point at Trinadelle, the other matched its movement but pointed at Twix. The mayor's grey eyes went wide as the black veins seemed to explode, filling the eyes with inky blackness.

Then he fell backward, his head hitting the armrest of his chair with a solid thunk. Trinadelle made to run forward but I reached out and pulled him back. The older man glared at me for a second before nodding and standing at my side.

“I think I broke him.” Said the same tilting voice but it came from the corner of the room and not from the mayor. The three of us spun around in shock. Standing there, with his back against a bookshelf as if he had been there all along, was a man.

A very freaky looking man. He was tall and incredibly thin. The three-piece suit he wore hung from his frame, baggy and loose. Hair so blonde it was almost white was combed neatly to the side and he looked at us with one brown eye and one green out of a face that was gaunt with sharp cheekbones and sunken cheeks.

“It turns out you can’t channel a gift through a third person. Too bad, it would have been so much more fun to watch you all try and kill that…sack of meat.” The man flicked a finger at the mayor's unmoving form.

He pushed off the shelf and walked across the room towards us. His arms were too long, his hands rested down near his knees and the sleeves of his coat only came up to the forearm, exposing the white cuffs of his shirt.

Trinadelle moved forward to intercept the man.

“Oh do sit down Vraga!” The man snapped and I blinked in surprise when Trinadelle dropped to his rump, his rapier falling to the ground beside him. Twix raised her bow, the movement was so smooth and practiced it took a fraction of a fraction of a second. She crumpled to the ground in a pool of black cloth, the arrow slipping from the string.

The man clapped his hands', his thin fingers coming together in a quick tap tap tap. “Now that that's dealt with. Sit down my Champion. My dead dead Champion.”

I remained standing, my body tense. I wondered if I could hit him before he dropped me in the same way he had Trinadelle and Twix. However, he did that.

“I said…sit down!” The man's voice turned hard at the end, the sound reverberating through my head and sinking into my brain. I almost did it too, my body was already turning towards one of the seats so I could follow his instructions before I stopped myself.

The man’s mismatched eyes got all watery as he continued to stare at me.

“Why aren’t you sitting down? I just told you to sit down. Sit down. Sit down. Sit down!”

“Fuck no. Fuck no. Fuck no!” I said back, mimicking his little tantrum.

“Why won't it work! It should be working. It always works!” The man was almost wailing now, his voice turning shrill as great fat tears trickled down his cheeks. Suddenly he stopped, his smile coming back and splitting his face in half. “It’s fine. I’ll sit and you may stand.”

He eased himself down with a content little sigh, his smile still present. The firelight dyed his exposed teeth a sickly yellow and the flames danced in his eyes. He turned them to me, an occasional tear still trickling from the corner, and blinked slowly.

“I had big plans for this place.” He said, his voice light and conversational. “They gave it to me you know, as a reward for my hard work. I thought it was a punishment at first, being out here with these…beasts and these…humans that treated them as equals…that was until I started my little game. They said I could do whatever I wanted, that this little corner of the world didn’t matter, but I did such a good job that they want me back.”

The man wasn’t making any sense and was clearly insane, but I listened anyway.

“Why aren’t you sitting?” The smile was back, pulling the man's face in half as his lips thinned out to lines and his teeth flashed in the firelight. I sat. “Good. Good. You may call me Smith. Yes, just Smith. They don’t like us having names so we are all Smith.”

“Who's they?” I asked.

“They are them. Obviously.” The smile faded and the tears were back. “They are them and them are they. I want to be them and they but they say I have to first become more like them. That’s why I did this.”

“Did what?”

“This plan. This little little plan. It’s genius. Would you like to hear it my dead little champion?” The tears stopped and his eyes once more widened as he leaned forward, his gaunt body leaning over the armrest to bring him closer to me.

“Sure,” I said, keeping my voice as steady as possible.

“The lady gave me my power she said I was special, a mind like mine was without equal and I should show the world what it was meant to be like. She called it…Dominance…” Smith clapped his hands, a little bit of drool wet his lips but his tongue darted out and pulled it back into his mouth. “It lets me control others…its fun…but there’s so many people. So much to control. I try. I try. I try!”

He was crying again but I ignored it. So he had a gift of Dominance but who gave it. In the story both Hela and Lumin were girls.

“I try to control everyone but it doesn’t work. They fight back and even Smith can’t fight them all. Too many words. Too many fights. Too much. Too much. Too much!” The tears kept rolling but the smile bloomed again and when he spoke it was back to being casual. “But I found that controlling animals was easier, they are governed by impulse more than anything. Instead of telling them to attack and having to explain to them why they are attacking and get around their…inhibitions, all I have to tell an animal is 'attack because it's bad' or 'attack because it's food'.”

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

“So you found a way to turn the Denvii into animals so they were easier to control?” I asked, sickened with the thought.

Smith rocked back in his chair, his slim fingers dancing through the air as he shook his head rapidly. His perfectly combed hair didn’t move an inch.

“Not me. Not me. Not me!” Two tears fell, the smile disappearing for a second but then it was back and as wide as ever. “Them. They figured it out. Chaos seed they call it. Mutate ball I call it!”

He let out another crazy laugh, his head tipping back to bounce against the chair. I glanced at Trinadelle to see if he was moving but he remained seated, his back to me. Twix was likewise still.

“Little bit of Earth, mixed with a little bit of us,” Smith said once he had gained control of himself again. “Gone wild. Bonkers. Crazy. Nutters. All of them. Just put it in the water and watch it spread. So easy to dominate.”

“And the mayor? You infected him as well?”

Smith looked around, his mismatched eyes darting from one corner to the next before he leaned towards me and whispered. “Tried. Doesn’t work the same on humans. Still hard to control too many humans. They made a mistake…but shhh don’t tell them.”

I nodded along, more than happy to let the crazy guy keep spilling his secrets.

“So how did you come here, my little dead Champion?” Smith asked suddenly, the smile on his face turning predatory. “They’ll want to know and I’ll want to tell them.”

“Well, you see, there was this wardrobe and when I walked through it…” I trailed off as Smith leaned more and more forward until his face was barely an inch from mine. “Yes?”

“Why didn’t you sit?”

“What are you talking about,” I asked with a frown. “I’m sitting right now. See, chair!”

“Stand!” He roared in my face, spittle spraying across my cheeks. His voice seemed to echo in my head again but it was easier to fight this time.

A screen popped up in front of my eye and I smiled, happy for the first time to have Aeris on my side.

The Champion bows to no man and shrugs off all influence.

Talent: Iron Will has evolved to Talent: Will of Steel.

* Your will is tampered and folded with sheer stubbornness. You refuse to give up and you refuse the control of others.

“Stand! Stand! Stand!” Smith roared in my face again and again but I was passed the point of caring.

He had just admitted to being the one responsible for controlling the Denvii and infecting them with this chaos seed or mutant balls or whatever. In my eyes that meant I could pull out his heart and solve the whole problem.

I overclocked and matched his crazed smile with one of my own. His face was still close, too close, but that was perfect. I threw a tight, sharp uppercut into his jaw.

There was a crack, like breaking bone, and the chair beneath Smith blew apart in an explosion of foam and wood splinters. The man himself staggered back, unhurt. I hadn’t hit him. Something had stopped my fist from making contact. I growled in frustration as I got to my feet and kicked my chair away. It went spinning across the room.

“I’m going to break your face,” I muttered, stalking towards Smith. “and then I’m going to go find them and they and fuck them up too!”

“Why hurt us?” Smith whined, tears rolling from his eyes once more. “Why hurt them? They are from Earth to. We are all from Earth.”

Then his tears stopped and his lips pulled up in that smile. “But you’re the dead Champion. The dead little Champion.”

“And you’re the dead Mr. Smith!” I was pissed off and a little eager to end this and that meant I was overclocking more than might have been necessary. The wooden floor cracked under my feet as I pushed off, launching myself the short distance to Smith's face.

I threw a punch containing my forward momentum, the force of my weight and speed. All that physics crap. It was a punch of beauty. It landed flush on the man's chest and the floor beneath his feet blew apart. Splinters, not bigger than toothpicks, blew out around us as the force of my punch was somehow directed into the ground. The damage didn’t just stop at the wooden floor though. The stone beneath cracked and a fine layer of dust and stone chips puffed up.

“You think they would send me here without protection!” Smith roared in my face before breaking into that maniacal laugh. I just punched him in the face again. The cracks beneath his feet spread.

I braced on my left foot and launched a straight kick into his stomach with my right. The floor beneath my foot cracked as some of the force fed back through my body, shaking up my insides and feeling horrible. Smith shot like a rocket across the room to slam into one of the bookshelves. The wooden frame broke apart under the impact and books rained down on the floor.

We were so going to fuck this room up. I didn’t care how long it took, I knew that shield or whatever the fuck he had couldn’t last forever so I’d just keep hitting him until it failed.

I stalked forward, an almost feral snarl ripping from my lips. Smith pulled himself from the wreckage and dusted the sleeves of his coat. He opened his mouth to say something but flinched as I picked up one of the seats, turned a full three-sixty and launched it at him.

He went flying back into the wall even as the seat broke apart on his shield. I kept stalking forward.

I think he realized what I was planning on doing because his eyes went wide and he raised his arms like a puppet master.

I took another step forward when there was a shrill whistle from behind him and I twisted in time to get slashed across the chest by Trinadelle and his rapier. Lucky for me that sword was more suited for stabbing than it was slashing and the wound was shallow if long. Blood leaked from the cut that ran across both pecs.

I opened my mouth to yell at the old man but closed it. Fucking mind control. I lashed out with a straight jab, more to keep Trinadelle off-balance than to do damage, and was surprised when it connected with his nose, snapping the old man's head back. Instinct and muscle memory meant that my left hook was already on its way before the jab had connected and my second blow sent the old man reeling.

“You may control the body but you have none of the skills.” I taunted Smith.

“Hit it as much as you like,” Smith laughed back. “It’s not my body. My body. My body!”

Crap. He had a point! I don’t even think Trinadelle was conscious. Would I have to destroy the brain like in some horror movie? I kinda liked the old man though. He had vouched for me and when things had gone wonky he had stood beside me and faced the Mayor. Crap, I couldn’t kill him.

I ducked under a wild slash, pushed the old man back hard enough that he fell over and sprawled awkwardly on the floor and turned back to Smith who stood there watching it all with a gleeful smile on his face. The smile disappeared when I threw a flying knee into his stomach.

The blasted shield blocked it again, but his body lifted off the ground and he went flying back again. It was a little like playing pinball and was it my imagination or was there a little more give in the shield this time.

“Stop!” Smith roared, but his gift just slid right off me and I kept advancing. Trinadelle came at me from the side but he was slow and unwieldy and his weapon was flailing about like he was trying to swat a fly with it. I just pushed him away again before turning back to Smith.

“Fine!” Smith yelled, his voice turning shrill. “Fine. Fine. Fine! You want to play like that. I can play like that! Let’s see how you fight an army!”

“What?” I asked, confused.

“I’ll be coming back for you, just you wait. I’ll be back my little dead Champion.” He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out what looked like a smartphone from the late two thousand before pressing something.

Then he was gone. Just like that.

I let out a roar of frustration and anger before picking up the remaining chair and tossing it across the room. It smashed against the bookshelf and shattered into pieces. Books fell to the floor as the bookshelf shuddered.

I released the energy and sagged, my breathing ragged. More from rage than exhaustion.

I had him. He was right there…and then he wasn’t. It was unfair! And he knew who I was now! I almost laughed out loud as a thought struck me. If they looked for someone named Alexander Haha October, they would find absolutely nothing. Thankfully I had changed my name.

“What happened?” Trinadelle groaned as he rubbed his jaw.

I just scowled. Still too pissed off to explain how the enemy had gotten away and how he had promised to come back with an army.