Knock! Knock! Knock!

Elric sighed. “Come in.”

Ace cracked open the door. He stepped into the apothecary, locking the door behind him.

Elric kept his back to Ace as he spoke. “What can I do for you?”

“You’re an avatar, right?” Ace asked.

“Yes.”

“How did you become an avatar?”

“Is this really necessary?”

“Yes.”

Elric put down the potion in his hand and turned to face Ace. “It’s nothing particularly special. My first real memory is of my parents selling to afford more drugs. From there, I was tossed around from place to place until I winded up on the streets.

“I had it better than most to be fair. There was a corner on the street nobody used, because of the rats there, but they never bothered me. Having a place to sleep each night was quite a privilege. I could get water from public areas. It was food that was the problem. I wasn’t strong, so I ended up getting the scraps of scraps. Everything I could find was moldy or rotted by the time I got to it.

“One day, I managed to get an apple. It was mostly rotted but there was enough for one clean bite. Now, normally I would save that for last, but I was so hungry that I just dove in immediately. Best bite of food in my life. I remember just wishing that every bite could be that good. Then I took another bite, and it was just as good. Then another, and another. All the rot on the apple was suddenly gone. That was my first ever use of alchemy.”

Elric told his story completely apathetically, without a hint of emotion in his voice.

“So you know what it’s like to starve?” Ace asked.

“Of course,” Elric said. “Starving is a terrible thing. I wouldn’t wish it upon any person.”

“Really? Number 7 looked like he was starving to me.”

Elric’s lips curled into a grin; he stifled his laughter. “Does the rest of your party know?”

“I told them to check it out. They’re probably beneath us right now,” Ace said.

“How did you find him?”

“The same way I found you.”

“But to reach out to his spirit, you would have had to know he was here. How is that possible”

“I didn’t know he was here,” Ace said. “He reached out to me.”

Elric cocked his head. “Hmm. I figured you had to initiate the conversation. If spirits can truly reach out to you at any time, then it’s something other than just a skill. But you don’t look like a hybrid. I don’t sense any powerful artifacts on your person. Unless …” Elric’s eyes widened with realization. “You’re just like me. You’re an avatar.”

Ace’s silence confirmed Elric’s suspicion.

“Wonderful, isn’t it? To be above others, who looked down on you your whole life.”

Ace had no idea what Elric was talking about. To know there are people looking down on you, you first need to look up, and Ace had spent the past few years with his head down.

“Why did you swap my skin with his?” Ace asked.

“Because I couldn't get rid of the chain otherwise,” Elric explained. “It’s a brand, emblazoned on your flesh. No matter how much I change your skin, I can't get rid of it, so I used somebody else's. Quite an elegant solution if you ask me.”

“I want you to put it back,” Ace said.

“What?!” Elric exclaimed in disbelief. “Absolutely not. I saved those children from the streets, where they surely would have died. They’ve spent their whole lives in a cage, it’s just that the one you saw had bars. I feed them enough to keep them alive, and I put a roof over their head. Those are guarantees you don’t have on the streets.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“That’s the exchange we have. I provide them with enough to live, and in exchange, I use them for my experiments. Don’t feel bad using them for their intended purpose.”

Ace couldn’t hold back his frustration any longer. “Their intended purpose isn’t to be a resource!” Venom practically oozed out of Ace’s mouth.

“But it is.” Elric’s tone wasn’t angry or argumentative, but confused; it seemed he genuinely didn’t understand Ace’s frustration. “None of those children have friends or family. They don’t have any meaningful connections or happy memories. They’re barely even alive.

“Is this why you were upset at seeing one of them be hungry? You viewed them as people. No, no, that’s entirely wrong. They’re much more like livestock than people. What kind of farmer overfeeds their animals? It’s a waste of gold.”

“You endured the same things they did, and yet you still can’t view them as people?! You said you wouldn't wish starvation on any person.”

“Yes, any person, but as I said, they aren’t people,” Elric explained. “It’s because I endured the same things that they did, that I know what I’m doing is right. What is so hard to understand?”

“What?” Ace’s fury fumbled into confusion for a brief moment.

Elric remained devoid of emotion. “I endured what they did, yes. However, I escaped that suffering because I became an avatar. If these childrens’ suffering is truly wrong, then the gods would have made one of them into an avatar, so they could have the power to free themselves. It’s what did for me after all.

“The gods saw potential in me, they knew my suffering was wrong, so they blessed me with the power to escape my prison. I’m living proof the gods intervene when things are wrong. I know they’re watching me. They haven’t done anything to stop me yet, so it doesn’t matter what I think is right, or what you think is right, through their inaction, the gods have deemed my deeds as right. So I cannot undo what I have done, for everything I have done, has been right in the eyes of the gods.”

The most unsettling thing for Ace was that Elric truly believed everything he said. Elric’s logic, to him, was obvious; he struggled to comprehend how somebody couldn’t agree with him. It wasn’t the children who were inhuman, it was Elric. There was no reasoning with Elric.

Ace reached into his bag and pulled out one of the dragon piercer bullets Kai had given him. Elric’s eyes were immediately drawn to the glinting bullet.

“Are you sure you want to do that?” Elric asked.

“Yeah, I am,” Ace said.

“Let me remind you that I am an avatar capable of molding the world to my will. I am Elric Feu, [The Hand of the Gods].” As Elric invoked his epithet a massive blast of essence radiated throughout the apothecary. Ace could feel electricity racing up and down his body, his hairs stood on edge.

Elric clasped his hands together. “[Transmute].” Elric’s skin shifted to a dark gray as if he walked through a cloud of dense ash.

Ace rolled the dragon piercer bullet in his palm. “Neat trick.”

Elric rolled up his sleeve and glanced at his discolored arms. “You think? I transmuted my skin to a form of carbon, the same element diamonds are made of. In this form, the carbon that makes up my skin is several times more flexible and durable than diamond.”

“Why are you explaining this to me?” Ace asked.

“Why haven’t you attacked me yet?” Elric asked. “You let me invoke my epithet, and use a skill, yet you don’t move a muscle. Your only chance was to attack me when my back was turned. Instead, you wasted that opportunity to threaten me.”

“Threaten you?” Ace smiled and shook his head. “No, no, no. I’m threatening you.” Ace held up the dragon piercer bullet. “This is a promise. I don’t care about your epithet. So what if you empower your next skill? If making your skin impenetrable was all you were going to do with that, I’m not worried.”

Elric chuckled. “You think empowering a skill is all an epithet can do? You must be a rather new avatar. As a sign of good faith for saving me, I was going to give you the chance to walk away. Seeing as how you’ve forsaken that possibility, I’ll show my generosity in a different way.”

Elric held up a single finger. “I’ll give you one free hit. Perhaps that will change your mind.”

Ace stared at the bullet in his hand, then up at Elric. “About what you said earlier. You’re right, I am an avatar.” Ace looked over his shoulder, directly into the blank red eyes of the Devil. Their shadowy form hung over Ace—visible only to him. The Devil’s arms draped over Ace’s shoulders enveloping him in a chilling embrace. “But I’m not like you.”

“Focus,”—Ace tossed the bullet in the air—”[Possess].”

As Ace’s essenced flooded into the dragon piercer bullet, it ripped through the air in a blur of bloody red toward Elric. Just before the bullet reached him, Elric managed to reach up a hand, positioning his palm directly in the bullet’s trajectory. However, Elric’s eyes widened in shock as the bullet’s trajectory suddenly changed; the bullet shifted in mid air, twisted through the gap between Elric’s fingers, corkscrewed up his arm, then bore itself directly into his eye.

“ARGH!” Elric screamed. He stumbled backward, clutching his eye as rivers of blood poured out from it. With rapid breaths, Elric desperately tried to muster enough air for a single skill. “[Transmu—”

BOOM!

The entire apothecary rumbled as the dragon piercer bullet embedded in Elric’s eye erupted. Elric screamed in agony as flames and evaporated blood burst out of his eye.

Elric’s whole body went limp. His hands that covered his bleeding eye, dropped to his side revealing an ashen, hollow eye socket. Smoke billowed out his eyes, nose, ears, and mouth.

The moment Elric’s corpse crumbled to the ground, Ace’s entire world began to spin. A skull-splitting headache lanced through his mind. A sudden intense heat flared up in his body. Ace stumbled his way over to one of the walls, catching himself before he fell. With every breath, his vision blurred, and his body grew weaker.

Ace only managed to whisper a few words before he fell unconscious. “What’s … happening … to me?”

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