~~~Caffeine~~~
Caffeine growled at the Brightness, but he didn't bark. It was helping protect Dearest Human this time. It was hurting the Bad Not Human that tried to kill Dearest Human. He liked that.
The Very Bad Not Human had tried to steal Dearest Human! Bad. Bad. Bad! Caffeine really didn't like it... Fake Stinky Bones! But Caffeine was so tired...
So he rested while Dearest Human did a lot of anger shouting. He didn't mind the anger shouting this time. Dearest Human was anger shouting at bad things that earned it. Especially the big Bad Not Human. That one was the worst. It did very bad things that hurt very much! It was mean!
Then Dearest Human tried to anger shout at a Not Dearest Human. A very frightened Not Dearest Human. That wasn't nice. She didn't deserve anger shouting. She wasn't like the Stinky Not Humans. So Caffeine got in the way.
It was what Dearest Human did for him sometimes, when the scary noises and tree stumps were extra dangerous. It was nice to help. Caffeine was a good boy. Not like the Stinky Not Humans! Not like the Bad Bad BAD Not Human!
Caffeine growled at it before Dearest Human made it go away again. "Bad Not Human!"
Dearest Human made all the bad Not Humans go away. That was good! But he smelled more and more like hurting... because the Brightness was hurting him. It was hurting both Dearest Humans!
Caffeine tried to make them feel better by eating the shiny rocks. Dearest Human liked it when he ate the rocks! He ate a lot of them while Dearest Human made the Stinky Not Humans go away. The Brightness was very good at making them go away. It made them not even stinky anymore.
The smell of hurting got worse... and Caffeine had to help Dearest Human. He barked and tried to tell Dearest Human to stop touching the Brightness... but Dearest Human was super angry...
Caffeine tried his best licking whines and tail wags that always made Dearest Human feel better... but it didn't work. He was super super angry...
So Caffeine had to growl at the Brightness instead. He had to eat it all like before, so Dearest Humans would be okay.
Dearest Human finally stopped anger shouting after that. He stopped everything and laid down for a nap. Naps were the best! Only... he still smelled like hurting! The Brightness had hurt him too much!
Caffeine went into Dearest Human's bag of delicious snacks, even though he wasn't supposed to... But he didn't eat Dearest Human's food. He brought it to napping Dearest Human. He was a good boy! "Snack! Treat!" he barked the magic words. "Hungry! Good boy!"
It wasn't working... Dearest Human kept napping... and he kept hurting. The hurting was getting worse...
Caffeine didn't know what to do... and he was so tired... he wanted to nap with Dearest Human, but naps were not the best when Dearest Human smelled like hurting!
Maybe it was all the Stinky Not Humans? They did make it smell bad here... Maybe if he dragged Dearest Human away from the bad smell!
Caffeine did that. He dragged Dearest Human away from the bad stinky smells. All the way past the house where the... he smelled them then. The other Not Dearest Humans.
Dearest Human needed more friends. He left his friends at the big house full of Not Dearest Humans. But friends were good! Friends made Dearest Human happy! Happy was good!
"I will bring you more friends," Caffeine woofed at Dearest Human. "They will help you with the hurting and the happy."
He gave Dearest Human a good face lick to let him know he would come right back. Then he ran to fetch the Not Dearest Humans. He was good at Fetch!
~~~Eve~~~
Eve huddled in the dark bathroom, unwilling to risk the light as she worked furiously by touch and magic alone. Her hand kept straying from the metal under her fingers, reaching into the dark to touch Zeke, to reassure herself that he was still there.
He was there and still unconscious as well.
Her fingers ached, and her mana was nearing empty as she forced it into the machine at her feet. Her legs burned and twitched from a day of running, her arms felt like noodles from carrying Zeke the whole way.
Dust sprinkled onto her head, and she stifled a cry of panic before any sound could escape her lips.
Outside, a war was raging. Almost non-stop explosions and shockwaves shook the building around her.
It had started fast, out of nowhere, and she feared what it meant while also wondering who the hell was fighting. She desperately hoped the undead hadn't found them... but knew she probably was exactly that unlucky. She'd seen that cloud to the south before it got dark, and she just knew who it had to be.
Though that still left the question of who was fighting whom out there. Were the crusaders still fighting? She'd assumed they were all dead by now.
One last drop of mana, and she had done it. Eve pressed the switch and watched her creation come to life... Finally got a fucking weapon! Then immediately shut it down when sudden silence descended like a bomb.
She crouched there in frozen terror and waited for something to happen, but nothing did.
Silence reigned.
Eve waited, frozen and hardly daring to breathe. Until... eventually, it was too much. She had to check.
Enough moonlight came through the windows of the truck stop that she could see once outside the bathroom. If barely. Enough to let her creep closer to the broken windows and try to make out the snippets of conversation she could hear.
Was it not the undead? Though, that giant skeleton had been talking before... Could they all talk? Or worse, was that fucking thing actually all the way up here?
It still didn't tell her who was fighting or why it had suddenly gone quiet.
She was about to peek outside when a deep voice shouted, "No!"
Eve froze. She knew that voice. It had followed her.
Her pounding heartbeat drowned out what it said next as she frantically tried to think of a way to escape. She couldn't run much farther... but... maybe she could lead it away...
She'd be abandoning Zeke again... but what else could she do? Was it better to stay by his side and die with him, or lead them away and die alone? What if they weren't tracking her? She didn't know how they were still on her tail. It might be Zeke they were following... and she would only save herself. Eve couldn't think of a worse outcome than that...
But someone had been fighting that monster... at least, that's what it'd sounded like. Whether they were winning or losing... that was the question.
Eve had to risk it. She peeked outside. If the undead had followed her here, then it was too late to run. Not to mention useless. But if she could help whoever was fighting it...
She saw the skeleton. It towered above the army of dead in the distance and was unmistakable. The motionless and still standing army surrounding it drained the last of her hope... whatever poor bastard had been fighting before, they'd clearly lost.
Bitter tears blurred the field of dark shapes and glowing red dots. It wasn't fair... she'd tried so hard to make it right...
All coherent thought fled when the light bloomed into blinding brilliance amidst the undead.
No... light wasn't even the right word for it. Zeke made light with his power. Beautiful, pure, healing light. This was beyond that. It was the glow of Cherenkov radiation shining upon you and sentencing you to death. It was the light of the sun going supernova and heralding the end of all life on earth.
It was power.
Eve stared into the light, frozen in equal parts terror... and longing. That power was her doom. Her end. Zeke's end. But she also wanted nothing more than to have such power for herself. She would be a god... anything she desired would be hers... and nothing would ever stand in her way again.
Of course, that wouldn't happen. She would die here, and Zeke with her. They'd never had a chance... the towering monster beside the skeleton told her that much. It made her sick just to look at it... a mess of different people. Pieces of them... and now it struck down against the...
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
The abomination never hit its target. Instead, its body contorted and twisted... until only a tiny ball of meat hung in the air above a glowing, outstretched hand. It was impossible. But also not. The power out there could do anything. Kill anything.
The skeleton said something, stepping away... then turned to dust with a booming blast of wind and dust.
She could see it so clearly. Could see everything out there. No darkness could exist anywhere near that blinding light. So she saw the army of the dead... and watched them all get ripped apart while a glowing god rose slowly into the sky.
Eve saw the skeleton return, reforming from nothing, and then being obliterated again. And again. Over and over. All the while, its army vanished around it.
It was wonderful. Glorious. Eve cheered on the destruction. She laughed when that fucking skeleton screamed and begged for mercy. She laughed...
...and it saw her. The glowing god looked her way with burning eyes of pure rage. Those burning eyes locked onto hers. They Hated her. Killed her.
Eve knew nothing after that. Only that she was dead. It was utterly absolute. Irrevocable. She was dead.
I don't want to die...
She didn't notice when something blocked the light. When something moved between her and those baleful eyes. When something turned them away from her.
Trait Earned...
It didn't matter. Eve couldn't breathe. She couldn't see anything. She couldn't think.
Zeke...
She was dead.
Run...
...
She tried to scream when something touched her arm... but her lungs had seized up. She tried to leap away, but her legs spasmed and buckled. Eve toppled... darkness dragging her down...
Then Zeke was beside her, his hands glowing with golden light as he touched her. "Eve!"
Where did he come from? He was asleep... and I was... dead.
Eve finally drew in a shuddering breath as soothing warmth saturated her body and mind. It helped drive back the nightmare... but not nearly enough.
What the fuck was that fucking freak!?
She couldn't believe she was alive... "Stop that!" She hissed and pulled Zeke's glowing hands away from her by his wrists. "Turn it off!"
Zeke flinched, and she saw that same horrible wilting crawl over his face as the glow winked out. The same expression that fucking cunt put on his face so many times...
Seeing it dragged Eve from thoughts of death, and she caught Zeke, pulling him down by his wrists until she could throw her arms around him. "I'm..." Her voice broke, and she couldn't force any more words past the choking sobs that clawed their way out of her throat.
Zeke stiffened for a moment in her arms... then he clutched onto her even tighter... and broke down. "Eve! I... I..." He couldn't seem to catch his breath as he sobbed into her shirt, and Eve wasn't any better.
Everything that had happened... It was too much. Weeks of torturous enslavement... the undead... running nonstop for hours and hours... her own somehow not quite realized death...
So she held tight to her baby brother and cried right along with him.
She felt worse once Zeke finally found his voice and started talking. "I... I killed her! Eve, I killed her!" Not quite talking, so much as wailing.
Eve felt sick. That fucking bitch! She wanted to scream at him. To tell him he did the right thing. To tell him that cunt got what she fucking deserved! She only wished she'd been the one to do it...
But none of that would help Zeke now. He'd never escaped from her clutches... never seen what their mother really was... so she gave him a pretty lie that wasn't too far off from the truth. "No, Zeke. You saved her. That monster corrupted her. You saw it. She was turning into a monster just like the rest... you did the right thing!" It wasn't too hard of a lie to serve up. He had done the right thing.
By helping to kill their mother. Their almost but not quite undead mother… Zeke hadn't even done anything bad to her. It was the cunt's own fault for turning herself into a monster!
Zeke still sobbed, but Eve was pulling her own emotions back under control. She hadn't forgotten that blinding god. She could never forget... though the light no longer shone through the windows. It didn't matter. They needed to flee. "Can you run? We need to keep moving."
He nodded into her shoulder, voice hitching as he replied, "Y... yes. I... I can... run."
Eve couldn't bring herself to push him away and waited anxiously until he finally let her go, his tear-stained face visible in the moonlight as he sat up. She'd already scrounged the truck stop for anything useful, which wasn't much, and threw the pack over her shoulder before scooping up the chainsaw.
She didn't want to travel in the dark, but the... thing that killed the undead might still be nearby... this must be its territory, and she'd just gotten lucky that it didn't see her and Zeke as a threat. Well, not Zeke. Not yet.
Eve still didn't know why she wasn't dead... it had wanted her dead... made her dead... but she wasn't... Even the new trait explained nothing. Fucking monster!
Now they needed to get the fuck out before it realized she was still alive. So she led Zeke into the night, in the opposite direction of where the monster had been.
A peek toward the battlefield was enough to see a veritable field of glittering cores shining in the dark. That was a lot of power just waiting for someone... Not a fucking chance!
Eve hurried the other way... then almost screamed when something made a loud, high-pitched noise nearby.
She froze, her right hand squeezing tight to Zeke's while her left hovered over the trigger of the chainsaw. All the while, she scanned the darkness for whatever had made that sound.
"There," Zeke whispered, pointing.
Eve followed his finger and saw a patch of something gray moving closer across the ground. The chainsaw whirred to life with what sounded like a deafening racket...
"Wait," Zeke said, almost shouting, "It's just a dog!" Then he lit up into a beacon with golden light.
"Too bright!" Eve hissed, tugging on his hand and barely resisting the urge to scream at him. She would not be like that cunt!
It helped that he was right. It looked like a pug as it stared up at them and whined again. Assuming you could judge anything on appearance anymore, which she knew you absolutely could not. "Shoo, dog!"
"Here puppy," Zeke bent down and offered his hand to the dog.
Only Eve's unadulterated desire to not be a bitch let her avoid releasing the scream bubbling up in her throat. She tried to pull him away, but it was too late. The dog reached Zeke's outstretched hand before she could drag him to safety, and it... licked his fingers with another whine.
"He's friendly," Zeke said, after she yanked him away. He was still fucking glowing... like the fucking sun!
"Fine," she ground out through gritted teeth. "Turn off the damned light and he can come with us!"
Zeke wilted again and went dark.
Eve remembered all the conversations she'd overheard between Zeke and the bitch. All the times that fucking cunt had called him evil or damned. All the times she'd made him wilt just like this when all he desperately wanted to do was make her happy.
She dragged him into a one-armed hug. "I love you, Zeke! Always! Forever! No matter what you do, no matter what you say! I'll never stop loving you!" He deserved better than the fucked up person Eve was, but it was all she had to give. "Your light is the best thing in this godfor... in this place. I want you to shine like the fucking sun! You hear me?"
He hugged her back... and the pug whined at them. "I... love you too," Zeke murmured into her chest, before turning toward the dog. Eve let him go when he pulled away and crouched to pet the pug. "It's okay, boy. You can come with us," Zeke said.
She really hoped it wasn't a monster in disguise...
The pug walked away from Zeke, then stopped and looked back with another whine.
"I think he wants us to follow him..."
Eve sighed, doing her best to keep it silent as she stared at her baby brother's face in the moonlight. The dog was definitely a monster, and now it would lead them into a trap to be devoured. "Let's go then."
It led them to an absolutely wrecked human laying in the dirt.
"Eve..." Zeke looked back at her, indecision plain on his moonlit face.
Eve grit her teeth while the pug whined. "Let there be light."
There was light, and Eve hoped the monster had moved far away by now. Zeke was special. He could do so much good for so many... He needed to see the truth of his power. To know it wasn't corrupt or evil like that cunt loved to spout off...
Damn... The dog's human wasn't as fucked up as she thought... just old as shit. Poor bastard probably had a heart attack when he saw that... that thing...
~~~Steven~~~
Shit! Shit! Shit! Steven cursed soundlessly as he careened through the streets. This was bullshit! He was supposed to be powerful!
He'd finally leveled enough to reach E-grade, finally gained the spells to become truly immortal, and now Lord Calderon was dead.
It was all because of that flying human. Steven felt sick just remembering the light... He'd felt so good when fighting, so powerful. Even if that fucker was a pain in the ass to pin down...
Lord Calderon had used his Eye...
Before Steven saw that Light, he'd thought seeing into Calderon's eye was the worst feeling imaginable. So, of course, the crazy human simply ignored it... even while Steven trembled from his mere proximity to that gaze.
It took the human down, eventually. Steven had been smiling, riding high on his first taste of immortality after that damned spear went through his head! Equal parts aggravating and exhilarating. Galling to be restrained like that... to be killed like that! But then seeing the despair in that bastard's eyes when Steven emerged unharmed. That was so very sweet.
He got to enjoy it for such a short time... before everything went to hell.
The only reason he still lived was because that demon killed Calderon so quickly. Steven's orders died with the lord, and he fled from the death nipping at his heels. It had come so close at the end there... he'd felt it coming... death whispering in his ear and caressing the back of his neck... then it stopped.
One moment he was wailing at the unstoppable specter of death, and the next it was gone. Nothing remaining but the memory. A memory so terrible that it couldn't be real. Only he knew it was real. He could never forget how real it was...
Steven seriously considered not returning to his new masters. His orders were gone. He had nothing holding him back from disappearing into the night.
He knew the ritual now... he didn't need them to be immortal... except there was no such thing as immortality. First, Morgrath nearly died, and now Calderon was truly dead. It was all a lie. Fake immortality. A trick that couldn't stand up against real power.
But then, nothing could stand against what he'd seen tonight...