Page 33 of Remnants: Disruption
I dive forward. The rock guy tries to intercept, but he’s slow. I pivot around him and let the inky tendrils whirl and jab. They slice into the rock of his skin, cutting off the earthen flesh in strips.
He cries out in pain, his hands coming up to protect his head. But the mistake was leaving his abdomen open. He receives the same treatment as the other two and four spiked tendrils pierce his stomach. They spread like someone opening a bagged gift and his entire gut opens, spilling gore and shooting fragments of bone in every direction.
The tendrils between my feet push me up higher than Titan. I send another spike towards Triggerman. It catches him around the ankle and snares him like a trapped rodent. He dangles upside down by the dark cable as I approach Titan.
“Interesting,” he rumbles, voice not entirely hiding his hesitation. “The Dark One masquerades as a simple Tier 1, then?”
“Seems so,” I say, stopping a few feet from him.
“Because of her, I suppose?” he gestures with his head at where Percy kneels in a stunned silence. Her slack jawed expression unchanged between the brutal slaughter and the conversation. “Or is there another reason for the deception?”
“You know how RISE gets,” I say, shrugging. “They might send someone bigger after me one day.”
“Yes,” he nods, raising his hands in a readied position. “There is always a bigger fish. It may be the single greatest lesson we will ever learn.”
The entire armada of my spiked tendrils fly towards him.
Titan is a killer. A murdering psychopath who draws delight and pleasure from torturing out the deepest and darkest secrets of his victims before brutalizing them.
But he’s also like me. He’s powerful. Inhuman. Functionally a god.
Alone.
An outsider.
He’d never be accepted, even if he weren’t a killer. He and I are simply two sides of the same, unmistakably tarnished coin.
And as his spiked, bloodied, and skewered corpse is pulled towards me, I almost feel sorry for him. Because one day, this will be me.
One day, they will send someone bigger after me. And on that day I’ll be helpless to fight back.
The last sensation is the concrete rising to meet me.
Chapter 18
Her III
Who Knows?
I wish for dreamless sleep. For that alone is the only time I shall be without the demons.
Unknown
The woman in the dark robe stares down at you like you’re the first meal she’s seen in centuries. Her incandescent, redeyes glow fervently beneath a darkened hood, covering all but full, red lips.
They quirk suggestively as you stare back at her, fear and panic echoing in the ethereal landscape that surrounds you.
“One day they will come for you,” she says, strange accent thick as ever, “and there will be no one to protect you.”
“I know,” you whisper, muscles tight, joints frozen. “They’ll kill me.”
She disappears, replaced by Percy. Her muscular form fills out the space around you—eyes hard and face twisted with rage. Her bionic hand reaches out, fingers splayed as they close down around your neck. Her teeth grit as she squeezes.
Air is trapped in your throat as the lights around you dim.
And dim.
And—
