171 The Devil? [Continuity?]
171 The Devil? [Continuity?]
Fragments brushed the surface of my awareness. They were thin, wavering strands of memory that felt as if someone else had lived them. Yet I knew they were mine.
I had once been a boss, the kind with men who bowed, knelt, and waited for my command. A ruler of a small force in the shadows. Not unlike my current host, Prince Grant. He was ambitious, hungry, and convinced the world owed him dominion. But unlike him, I had possessed true power. An authority no mortal blade or throne could ever give.
Sometimes the memories came like the soft drip of water in a cavern. It was slow, faint, but steady. A base… Followers… An organization with a purpose.
Continuity. Yes. The continuity of power. That was our mission. To prevent the cycle from breaking. Why did that matter? What was my role in it? That part remained beyond reach, like a word half-formed at the edge of waking.
But the instinct remained. And now it lived through Grant.
Grant cut down mundane soldiers as he pursued the stragglers who fled the cavefront. A flare of teleportation displaced the air beside him as he appeared behind one soldier and tore out the man’s throat with augmented strength. Flames roared from his palm as he incinerated another group in the brush. Then he blurred forward with super speed, crashing into a mounted guard and snapping the rider’s spine with a casual twist.
Regeneration sealed the cuts he’d earned in the process. Flesh knitted. Blood dried away. Grant didn’t even slow down.
“Deal with the rest,” he ordered sharply, and the bandit coalition, those he had shaped through hypnosis, suggestion, and the occasional removal of troublesome free will, obeyed instantly. They fanned out into the forest to finish the survivors.
Grant spurred his horse hard, galloping toward the direction where the nobles fled. His hatred for them pulsed hot and bright with envy, resentment, and ambition, all layered atop the foundation I’d helped strengthen.
“That’s right, Grant… Immerse yourself with your power… Become more!”
Grant wielded too many powers for someone whose natural gift was merely hypnosis. His abilities should’ve remained small, subtle, and mental. But when I awoke inside him and attached myself to him, his power didn’t just grow. It branched.
With hypnosis as the core, he forced influence outward, constructing his own evolution of superhuman strength and speed. Under my distant, hazy guidance, he acquired the rings, once magical weapons forged by the legendary artisan of the age. With my control over cause and effect, I reforged them into conduits only he could use.
Ten rings. Ten augmentations. Ten paths of power twisted into one vessel.
This world’s technology fascinated me. These “magical weapons” were unlike the technology of my homeland. They obeyed strange laws, binding their function to gifted blood. The blacksmith who forged them had left no name, no legacy, only weapons scattered across the continents. It was a mystery wrapped in iron and enchantment.
The horse beneath Grant began to foam at the mouth, muscles shaking violently. He was using hypnosis to override its exhaustion, forcing it to sprint far past its limits. I tasted the creature’s pain in the air. It was raw and panicked, betraying the animal’s body as it obeyed a mind stronger than its own.
When Grant finally reached the fleeing bandits who slowed to regroup, he leaped from the saddle and let the horse collapse behind him. It died before it hit the ground.
Grant’s eyes blazed with fury. “YOU DARE slow down? You dare disobey my command!?” His aura tightened with psychic strangulation. “Insubordination is death!”
He seized a bandit by the jaw, one fully under his hypnosis, and snapped his neck without ceremony.
The others dropped to their knees at once.
“M-my prince!” one screamed, trembling so hard he could barely speak. “W-we didn’t disobey! P-please! F-forgive us!”
Grant reached toward him, but the bandit suddenly shrieked and pointed behind them.
“Y-YOUR HIGHNESS! THERE’S A MONSTER BEHIND US!”
Grant’s brows tightened when the bandit cried monster. His first thought flickered toward the “dragon” he had crafted, his grand lie and centerpiece of fear, but that beast had been nowhere near the beginning of the operation. If anything, its absence irritated him more than the bandit’s panic.
“There is no monster,” he snapped. His presence pressed down like a cold weight. “Are you fools so weak of will?”
The bandits trembled. Their minds, already softened and pliant from repeated hypnotic conditioning, wavered like wet clay. Grant stepped toward them, and the tone of his voice shifted, dripping with honey.
“Would you give up the cause now?” he asked, voice low and coaxing. “Would you throw aside everything we built together? Have you already forgotten what I promised you?” His gaze swept over them, seizing their fear and twisting it into something useful. “Freedom from the nobles who treated you like dirt. A chance to rise. To be more than nameless thieves crawling in the mud.”
Some of them straightened without realizing it.
“You followed me because you believed my dream could become your dream,” Grant said. “Do you still believe?”
A few nodded at once. One shouted, “We do, your highness!”
“Good,” Grant said softly. The edge of his smile was beautiful in a cruel way. “Then stand.”
Grant’s hatred for the nobility ran deep, festering and old. Even as a prince, he viewed nobles as parasites, leeching off the world with their birthrights and their arrogance. The reason was simple: his mother had been a maid, a servant whose life was swallowed whole by a drunken king. Grant was the result of that violence.
When I first woke in this world, still dazed and wounded from whatever catastrophe had hurled me into this place, Grant was the only mind close enough, open enough, and desperate enough to latch onto. I had been vulnerable to emotions then, a little too raw to hide what I remembered. I spoke to him freely, not realizing how starved he was for stories of anywhere but here.
He clung to every detail of my world. Especially the idea of democracy.
It hit something twisted in him. It was utterly twisted, and then it cracked open into something even stranger. He began to plan, obsessively, how he could force such a system onto a kingdom stuck in a dark age of gifted tyrants. His logic was deranged, but ambitious, and I recognized pieces of my old world in his madness.
Records of the SRC. A world of powers. A world of conflict. A name I knew, but couldn’t fully remember. More memories had been surfacing lately. And with each one, I felt the moment of parting draw closer. The moment I would no longer be bound to Grant.
But for now… I didn’t mind helping him reach his dream.
A sudden spike of danger stabbed through my awareness as Grant’s empathic sense flared, a warning crackling down his spine.
He twisted just in time.
‘Thwip!’
An arrow cut the air so close it sliced a few strands of his hair. Grant ripped his sword from its sheath, used super speed to intercept the second arrow, and flicked the shaft away. Light glinted off the rings on his fingers with gifts he could not amplify, yet mastered through relentless self-hypnosis. He controlled his own limitations, turning them into flexible tools.
A fireball swelled in his palm. It was hot, compressed, and focused. With enhanced vision and a burst of speed, he hurled it toward the source of the arrows.
The tree ignited instantly.
From the blaze, a woman burst forth, leaping between burning branches, her skin marked with tiger stripes that glowed faintly in the heat. She drew another arrow, movements smooth and predatory, completely unafraid of the fire chasing her heels.
Recognition pricked at me.
I hissed a warning into Grant’s mind. “Be careful. I know her. She’s from my world.”
The moment I saw that striped woman, something inside me cracked open. Memories I had buried under layers of fog rippled upward, jagged and hot. It had started the last time I sensed her and the man beside her, those two mercenaries Grant’s spy master had reported on. Nick and Amelia were the names that pathetic worm had used, but those labels never felt correct to me.
No… those were masks.
‘Tigress. Eclipse.’
That was what my mind called them, and those names struck with the weight of truth.
But who were they? Why did my thoughts twist with unease whenever I tried to recall their faces in another world?
The memories refused to settle, but they stirred violently now.
A metallic hum cut the air.
A telekinetic sword. It was floating, spinning, and aimed like a spear. It shot straight toward Grant’s heart. It reminded me of the Royal Guard’s weaponry, except more refined… more alive! Arrows followed it in a storm.
Two seconds into the future, Grant would have died, regeneration or not. The sword would have cored his chest and the arrows would have pinned him to the ground like a butchered stag.
But his precognition flashed, a small ripple of awareness. Only two seconds. Such a weak imitation of Abner’s foresight.
Still, it saved his life.
Grant twisted aside and let the telekinetic blade slice past him. Sparks streaked the air from its passing, the power inside reacting to his pyrokinesis. Magic weapons always behaved like that, less effective against matching powers, stronger when paired with complementary ones. Their whole strength came from synergy.
Which was why Grant, with the ten rings reforged by my power, was a walking catastrophe. Hypnosis bridged the rings. Cause and effect bent for him. Every power he had fed into the next like cogs in a machine.
A shadow appeared ahead.
It was Eclipse. He was only a few steps away.
Grant reacted instantly. With super speed, pyrokinesis heating the air, teleportation folding space for a smoother throw, and gravitykinesis adding crushing weight, he hurled a dagger fast enough to scream.
It passed right through Eclipse’s skull.
Intangibility.
Grant froze not from fear, but from shock.
I, however, remembered.
“Eclipse!”
He was the one who killed me.
A flash of something hurled at my face. It was a device, a grenade of some kind. Light that ruptured space… My powers surging out of sync… A chain reaction ripping through cause and effect… And then darkness!
I remembered taking both Eclipse and Tigress with me, ripping them apart in the same moment I died as my power went ‘insane’ without its host. They should be dead! B
“Kill him!” I screamed into Grant’s mind. “KILL HIM NOW!”
Grant lunged forward.
And the future snapped into place.
Two seconds ahead, Grant stood with a dagger embedded cleanly in his forehead. He toppled like a puppet with its strings cut. The instant Eclipse’s hand brushed his skin, something unseen pulsed, like a switch being flipped.
Just like that, Grant died unaware how it happened.
Death was not something Grant had ever truly tasted before.
“And I have no plans of dying yet,” screamed Grant. “I’m gonna live!”
I felt his consciousness twist in my grip with confusion, disbelief, and the frantic attempt to understand what had just happened. His two-second precognition had shown him nothing but the sensation of dying… Eclipse’s hand brushing his skin… and then total erasure.
“How?” Grant’s mind screamed the question. “How can intangibility kill me instantly!? How!?”
I forced myself deeper, clawing through the haze of my own broken recollections for anything about Eclipse. And then a shard of memory stabbed through.
Eclipse phasing into a man’s torso, disrupting the atoms inside him. Eclipse burying someone halfway into stone until their body snapped. Eclipse phasing explosive force through matter like a surgeon wielding a bomb.
His intangibility was not mere avoidance. Instead, it was an execution method. A perfect guillotine hidden inside a ghost.
I projected this memory into Grant’s mind in an instant, shoving the vision straight into his panic. Only microseconds had passed. But his precognition still showed the same ending. Two seconds in the future, he was dead again.
Dead. Dead. Dead!!
Then came the migraine.
A spike of psychic pressure drove straight into Grant’s skull, splitting his thoughts apart. I felt the feedback through our bond, and for the first time in years, I recoiled.
“Psychic interference.” Eclipse was jamming his brain, and I realized he must’ve used this opportunity to reach Grant and phase him underground. “Grant! Stay on your toes!”
Teleportation wouldn’t help, since he couldn’t even coordinate it. Regeneration couldn’t fix a crushed mind. Empathy only sensed physical danger, not psychic assault.
And my own manipulation of cause and effect, already diluted in this wretched world, was shackled, and made sluggish by the psychic turbulence. It was exactly why, in my former life, I had despised dealing with psychics.
“Grant,” I hissed directly into his deepest layer of consciousness, “use our trump card. Now.”
Within the rings, another ability stirred… It was symbiosis.
A strange, rarely used power that allowed him to offload the burden of his abilities and empower others through that same network. It worked best with someone already connected to him… someone he had been cultivating.
Grant reached for that bond instantly.
“The slave.”
A man with dead eyes and ragged clothes. The quiet creature who was always collared, always bruised, and always watching.
He burst out of Grant’s shadow like a living nightmare, his true body made of darkness itself. Umbrakinesis twined with a regeneration so unnatural it bordered on immortality. His flesh was irrelevant, and his shadow was his core.
And Grant’s blessing born from hypnosis and my guidance, flooded into him like a second spine. His outline flickered, then sharpened. His shadow stretched like a blade.
I felt the surge. Even I shivered.
“So this is what he becomes when properly empowered…”
But rage followed close after.
Where were the others? The mercenaries Grant sent ahead? The ones he had blessed as well, and where were they during this critical moment!?
“Useless,” I spat in disdain. “All of them useless.”
“My slave!” Grant roared aloud, his voice cracking with fury as he fought the psychic pain. “I grant you my blessing… now KILL THEM!”
The shadow-man lunged.
Grant gave his “blessing” with reckless abandon, pouring hypnosis through every nerve in his body while I twisted cause and effect around him.
The shadows at the slave’s feet started to boil like tar, swelling into grotesque shapes. One after another, dark apparitions crawled free with half-formed copies of the slave, each snarling silently as they peeled away from the main mass.
Grant threw his head back and laughed like a child seeing fireworks for the first time, drunk on the illusion of invincibility. Even I had to admit, the display was impressive. This level of raw output would have made him a match for the heavy hitters I once commanded within Division Five… Division Five? That word stung like a half-remembered wound. These damned gaps in my memory were becoming more frequent and more irritating.
The celebration didn’t last long. Arrows rained through the trees, bursting the apparitions into shadowy mist. Grant staggered and sucked in ragged breaths, the cost of using so many powers finally catching up to his mortal frame. I sifted through my resurfacing memories, recalling Eclipse’s fighting style of how he carved through defenses with intangibility, how he phased through terrain to create openings, and how he vanished by sinking into the ground like a ghost slipping between realities. When I realized I could no longer sense him, dread flickered through me.
“Grant, behind you!” I screamed into his mind as the truth clicked. His empathic danger sense wasn’t working. Eclipse was an Empath too, and an overwhelmingly powerful one.
Grant spun just in time to clash with the figure flickering beside him. Eclipse’s sword struck like lightning, followed immediately by a dagger swipe meant for Grant’s throat. Grant parried both with a burst of super speed, though barely, and stumbled backward from the intensity of the assault.
Before Grant could counterattack, another presence rushed into the scene. A woman—no, the dragon woman, though now only in her humanoid form! She burst from the foliage, her voice cracking as she screamed at the slave. “Brother, stop!” Her emotional burst hit the battlefield like a shockwave. The slave’s shadow writhed in confusion. Grant reacted instantly, reinforcing the hypnosis as hard as he could, forcing obedience through the slave’s mind with brute will. But the reinforcements came faster.
Abner barreled through the chaos and tackled the slave, pinning him long enough for Lady Thornland to appear from the opposite side, her guards flanking her. Her hand clamped onto the slave’s forehead, and biokinesis surged through her fingers in a violent cascade. I felt it the moment the hypnosis unraveled, our careful work being peeled apart strand by strand. Fury surged through me, acidic and sharp. For the first time in years, I felt the sting of inevitable defeat, and I hated every second of it.
Then a plasma bolt screamed across the battlefield, tearing through trees to our left. Grant didn’t sense it at all. The source was the little lordling, Blasten, the brat had unleashed a miniature sun. The thought of losing to Eclipse again twisted my insides. I refused to tolerate it. Grant felt me gathering power and panicked, begging me not to take over, but I crushed his consciousness flat like a buzzing insect. His body became mine.
I raised one ring-covered hand and seized the plasma bolt mid-flight, reversing its movement and hurling it straight back. Blasten barely had time to gasp before the bolt vaporized him. Now the rings burned with ten different powers from teleportation, pyrokinesis, super speed, super strength, regeneration, empathic danger sense, enhancer abilities, gravity manipulation, symbiosis, and precognition. The sword in my other hand radiated invulnerability.
With this arsenal, even Eclipse should have been dead already.
I smothered the psychic noise around me, suppressing Eclipse’s abilities as best I could while channeling fire along the invulnerable blade. Flames rolled down the sword, turning it into a radiant arc of destruction. I stepped forward with full killing intent, no more restraint, no more games.
“Just die already, will you, Eclipse?”