Two Years Ago

A village, wrecked and destroyed. Bodies and buildings were scattered about on one side, all cleanly cleaved into two. The other half had been decimated by massive rocks, crushed by an enormous landslide. Desert winds raged through the valley surrounding it with the echoes of a cataclysmic battle, yet to meet its conclusion.

Three people floated midair above the destruction.

A boy, barely a teen, with wild eyes and back hair, dressed in a rugged and torn pair of bleach-white clothes, and splattered from head to toe with blood. He was obviously beyond tired, dark circles clearly visible beneath his eyes and his body decrepit and worn, yet he smiled, his eyes wide with rage.

A woman, twenty years old, her fingers quaking, her eyes similarly wild, though with pure fear and adrenaline. She wore what should have been casual clothes; a pair of jeans and a tye-dye shirt, yet they were also stained with blood, only on the edges.

The last was a man only a little younger than her. His expression was the same as hers, though he wore clothes more appropriate for the desert they were in, and his skin was the same hue as the boy’s, much darker than the girl’s.

The older pair were glaring at the young teen, in particular.

“Stop this...” the girl said to the boy through heaving breaths. “Please...” And although she begged and pleaded, she knew it would result in nothing.

“Stop wasting your breath on him, Parkarka,” the older boy said furiously to her, not taking his eyes off the quiet teen. “This fucker will never rest until everyone is dead!”

“Please...” Parkarka begged, still looking to the younger boy. “Azad, we’ve-”

“Please die.” Azad swung his hand down faster than the speed of sound, and as he did, a black whip over a kilometer long materialized in his hand, appearing directly above the girl. When his hand moved, it snapped down at incredible speeds, yet she flew to the side, evading it. The whip cut through the earth a hundred meters beneath them as though it were air, annihilating all matter as it passed through. The slice made in the earth was quickly swallowed up by the ground collapsing into the empty space with a rumble.

Parkarka breathed hoarsely, as did her partner. She could see the inner turmoil in the boy as clear as day, but she didn’t understand it at all. Azad’s eyes, while wild and filled with rage, did not shine. It was almost as if those emotions were obligatory to him, a mask to cover up his pain.

She wanted to help him, despite the millions of lives the beastly child had taken, but Parkarka knew deep down that the boy named Azad would never change. Maybe he couldn’t.

“Fine...” she said with the utmost reluctance, finally ready to do anything and everything it took to subdue the threat against the world. Giving him any sympathy was a mistake on her part, a mistake made through her surplus of empathy and one that may have stained her with blood. “Shuneal, I’m ready.”

“You weren’t already?!” her partner said to her with fury, clenching his fists, despite being on her side. He digressed promptly: “Then we move.”

Suddenly, the battle, which had entered a lull, burst out again.

Azad, in a split second, cut at Shuneal with his whip, and he flew out of its path, slicing through the air at the speed of sound as the boy chased after him.

Countless rocks from around the valley slopes rose from the combatants’ telekinesis, then began flying through the air all at once.

Pakarka chased Azad, throwing stones in his path to halt his approach toward Shuneal, so he immediately turned to face her, cutting at her again with his whip, which she quickly flew from, only for a rock to hit her in the back, cracking against an invisible barrier surrounding her, her eyes bulging and muscles twitching as the hit wreaked the psychic with mental pain.

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Before the boy could follow up the attack with another crack of his eerie whip, a flash of lightning struck against him, deflecting off his own invisible barrier in a savage flash. It caused pain to flicker through him as well, but he hid it behind his rarely-faltering smile and harsh breaths.

Shuneal sent a barrage of small boulders hurdling at the boy, and he sidestepped the attack before another barrage was sent by Parkarka. He launched to the ground, avoiding it, and stopped ten meters above the wrecked village below. Buildings, rubble, and bodies rose, then defended him against the other two psychics’ simultaneous attacks, acting as a shield against the boulders they threw. He began blindly slashing his whip at them, cleaving through both his scrappy shield and his foe’s attacks in an attempt to cut them.

A flash of lightning struck his shield, then crashed toward him at a visible speed. Shuneal had enveloped his own barrier in lightning and used it to break through Azad’s defenses, uncaring for the countless human bodies he’d torn apart in the process. Nothing would stand between him and the boy’s death. Azad immediately darted away from the living projectile, slashing at Shuneal with a whip of blackness as he did in an attempt to halt his approach. Shuneal only barely swerved away from the attack, the whip cutting through the air just centimeters away from his arm, straight past the barrier which would have stopped most physical attacks.

As Azad ran, boulders upon boulders were launched at him from above by Parkarka, and the lightning enveloping Shuneal grew brighter and brighter, orbiting him at incomprehensible speeds.

Azad kept cutting at him as they fought through the town’s desecrated streets, blowing through buildings and rubble alike at the speed of sound, as though they weren’t even obstacles, while Shuneal played a dangerous game, narrowly avoiding the whip’s strikes, despite how immediately deadly the attack was.

Boulders rained from above at supersonic speeds, and Azad hardly managed to avoid them, even though his flight was significantly faster than his opponents’, struggling to accelerate away from the incoming attacks.

He had taken a beating. Days had passed since Azad had been given time to rest, and his psyche had deteriorated over that time. He could hardly think his way out of the situation rationally, but he could feel when the tide was shifting.

The attacks were too frequent, his opponents too fast, too competent. Just a few more clean hits, and he would be spattered across the ground, overcome by their superior endurance. He was on the defensive.

And so, seeing no other option through his torn mind, Azad allowed Shuneal to strike him, slowing straight into his thunder-coated barrier.

In a flash of lightning, an explosion rang out.

And as he had approached and watched the determined, accepting face of his aggressor as he collided his own psychic barrier with his opponent’s, Azad cleaved through Shuneal’s torso with his black whip in a lethal strike.

Yet the assault did not end. Even as dust covered him, Parkarka shot boulders and timber toward him faster than bullets with the intent to finish him off. A wildly aimed black whip made her falter in fear, then Azad, his mind so deteriorated that he couldn’t possibly think about the repercussions of it, flew straight toward the other psychic as fast as he possibly could. Although she tried to escape his pursuit, he slowed her with cuts of his whip, forcing her to hesitate, and finally, he crashed into her at hypersonic speeds, mindlessly planning on his own barrier’s endurance outlasting hers in a final, self-defeating strike.

What resulted was reality itself warping.

Slowly arcing, blue thunder, unlike anything ever witnessed in all of humanity’s existence, cracked out from their two protective barriers, trailing against the ground, and as it did, an otherworldly moan reverberated through the air, instead of a crackle. As the sound moved through the valley, it moved space, causing light to warp and bend around it, turning into a white, expanding sphere of light.

Then, as it expanded, it formed a rainbow of colors, for only a brief moment, and vanished.

The two combatants crashed into the mountain, one of them tumbling mere meters away from the other like a ragdoll while the other’s barrier made a crater in the stone.

Parkarka, her mind throbbing with pain, rose from the crater and stared at her mortal foe, laying on the ground. He looked up at her with a vaguely scared expression, and then his eyes wandered, seemingly past her, turning mortified.

So many people she knew had died to him, and now...

She telekinetically raised a rock, ready to end the monster’s life quickly, but as she did, something flew past her.

A solid, green light shot past her shoulder and then engulfed the boy just as Parkarka panickedly shot the rock at him, unsure what to make of the new variable.

The light engulfed him for only a split second, then the boulder landed.

It bounced through the green light as it shrunk and dissipated, then tumbled down the mountain aimlessly.

Parkarka fell to her knees, looking at the empty ground with wide, disbelieving eyes.

She had failed.