252 Grim Reaper
252 Grim Reaper
I won.
The word felt foreign in my mind as I stood amid the ruin I had created. With intangibility honed to a razor’s edge, I had reached into the skeleton’s chest and found the locus of him. Not bone. Not psychic projection. Something deeper. I tore through the barrier he had layered around it, shredded the resistance, and ripped his soul free.
It had not been clean.
It had not been easy.
Bodies lay strewn in every direction, mutilated, missing limbs, torsos crushed or bisected. The air reeked of ozone, rot, and something else that felt metaphysical, like burnt incense in a desecrated temple. My legs trembled as I stood over the carnage, Rodney’s skull gripped in my hand. Within it flickered a faint psychic glow, his presence condensed into a dying ember.
I looked down at him. “Why did you do it?”
He had not lied. That was the part that unsettled me most. The only reason I managed to kill him was because he let me. At the final moment, he exposed the core of himself and allowed my power to touch it.
Rodney’s voice resonated weakly from the skull, no longer commanding armies of undead, no longer bending reality with viral telepathy. “Because it seems you needed it. There is a small flickering ember within you. So bright. Such a beautiful soul.”
“But I don’t have a soul,” I said flatly.
“Ah,” he replied gently, “that probably explains the cold sensation I always felt from you. I am no scholar of souls, but I have perceived them since childhood. They are beautiful things. You… are different. Thank you, truly.”
I frowned. “You remember now?”
“Yes,” he answered. “That is your gift to me. As death stared me in the face, my life returned in fragments. I saw my life flash before me. I saw myself in an alleyway, bleeding from multiple bullet wounds. I remember the cold pavement. The taste of iron. Such a miserable end. Yet I am grateful for everything that came before.”
So he had been a superhuman even before his first death. A cape pulled once by fate, then pulled again in death, transformed into something beyond mortality.
“I woke filled with rage,” he continued. “Rage at those who wronged me. I killed without measure. Again and again. I justified it as balance. I told myself I was correcting injustice. But I was only feeding it. As I escalate, my powers continued to grow. I believe you walked a similar road.”
“How could you tell?” I asked.
He gave a faint chuckle. “My good lad, game recognizes game.”
Despite myself, I almost smiled.
His presence began to thin, the psychic flame flickering lower.
“Be careful,” he said softly. “It is often the beautiful things that hide the devil within. I will be cheering for you, wherever I end up.”
Then he was gone.
The skull in my hand felt ordinary.
I exhaled shakily and let myself drop among the corpses. My body screamed from accumulated strain, though my mentality kept true exhaustion at bay. I stared at the empty eye sockets of the skull.
“I feel so damn complicated,” I muttered. “Is this what heroes feel?”
I leaned against a nearby cadaver and noticed a chain glinting faintly at its neck. A cross. I stared at it for a moment before phasing it free and tossing it aside. The gesture was not anger at faith, but something else. Rejection, perhaps. I did not know who I was rejecting.
From Rodney’s skull, I pried a single tooth. With careful application of intangibility, I shaped it into a crude pendant and threaded it onto a strip of torn fabric. A trophy felt wrong. A reminder felt appropriate.
I forced myself upright and limped toward the nearest intact structure.
It was a church.
Of course it was.
Inside, silence reigned. No shambling dead. No psychic whispers. When Rodney died, his network collapsed. The undead had fallen instantly, their animating force severed. The apocalypse ended not with a bang, but with a man choosing to die.
I lowered myself into a pew, the wood creaking under my weight. Dust motes drifted through fractured stained glass light. I used to enjoy zombie movies. I used to think they were entertaining hypotheticals.
I had just lived one.
I leaned back and stared at the ceiling.
“If an afterlife is real,” I murmured, “then Mom, you’re watching me, right?”
It was not a prayer. I did not know how to pray.
Instead, it was a wish thrown into the void.
“Give me strength.”
For the rest of the day, I rummaged through the wreckage of the city.
Buildings had collapsed into jagged skeletons of concrete and steel. Highways folded into themselves like ribbons. Fires still smoldered in pockets, though without Rodney’s undead roaming the streets, the world felt eerily quiet. My porcelain mask had shattered during the fighting, one lens cracked beyond repair. My smartwatch was worse. Its screen was destroyed, internal circuitry exposed and fused. Every auxiliary function I relied on for communication and tactical overlay was gone.
The fight had been catastrophic.
I had suffered more injuries than I cared to count, though most of them had already faded into numbness. Something had changed inside me during that week-long battle. My intangibility had skyrocketed to a degree that defied conventional scaling. If someone attempted to rate me now, the rest of my powers would likely register as nonexistent.
They had not vanished.
They had assimilated.
I no longer needed the anti-power potions Dr. Time sent. The internal friction between abilities was gone. Everything bent around a singular axis.
Intangibility.
My chronokinesis no longer felt like manipulation of time. Instead, it manifested as localized spatial freezing, as if I pinned sections of reality in place by refusing to acknowledge their continuity. Enhancer had shifted into a hyper-intuitive spatial awareness. I no longer felt stronger in a muscular sense; I felt geometrically aligned with my surroundings.
Biokinesis had disappeared entirely. I could not even sense my own internal structure the way I once did. My insides felt abstract, undefined. Electrokinesis, empathy, telepathy—each one had dissolved into variations of the same phenomenon.
My intangibility now extended into the psychic spectrum.
When I focused, I could see through a person’s essence. Not flesh. Not neurons. Something deeper. If I concentrated long enough, I could glimpse what might be called a soul.
“This feels nauseating,” I muttered.
The world doubled around me.
Translucent figures drifted at the edges of my vision, mirage-like impressions overlapping physical reality. They surrounded me as I walked through the ruins, their forms flickering in pale hues.
They touched me.
“Thank you.”
“You saved us.”
“You have our gratitude.”
“That monster is finally dead.”
“You liberated us.”
Each time one brushed against me, they dissolved into faint light and vanished. It felt less like destruction and more like release, as if a tether had finally snapped.
It was deeply unsettling.
One woman did not vanish immediately. She stepped in front of me, her features clearer than the rest. Her hands rested on my shoulders, cool but without physical resistance.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “You saved my husband and so many of us. He didn’t want this. I know he didn’t. I watched from behind him. I cried for him, but he couldn’t hear me.”
So Rodney had seen souls, but even he had limits.
“O Rodney,” she said softly, turning her gaze somewhere beyond me. “I will return to your side.”
She looked back at me once more. “Thank you, stranger.”
Then she faded.
Days passed.
I searched for salvageable technology among the ruins, trying to piece together something functional enough to contact the SRC. They had quarantined this world aggressively, fearful of Rodney’s necromancy. I did not blame them.
The ghosts kept coming.
Word spread among them, somehow. Every day, more gathered around me in silent lines, reverent and patient. They would approach, touch me, and disappear. At first it unnerved me. Then it irritated me.
Eventually, I understood.
They were not worshipping me.
They wanted to move on.
Whatever Rodney’s power had done to them had trapped them in a liminal state, anchored by his existence. When I tore his soul free, the lock loosened. My altered intangibility simply finished the process.
So I began helping them deliberately.
I replicated the phenomenon consciously, focusing my power along the psychic axis and gently severing whatever tether remained. They dissolved into light, not pain. I did not know their destination, only that they yearned for it.
Curiosity got the better of me once.
I turned the same technique inward.
The sensation was immediate and catastrophic. My perception began to collapse, my sense of self thinning as if reality rejected my presence. I halted the process instinctively, heart racing.
“I knew it,” I breathed.
If I continued, I would die.
It was not liberation for me.
It was erasure.
On the fourth or fifth day, I sensed something different. A subtle mechanical hum layered beneath the silence. I looked up and spotted a drone perched atop a fractured lamppost, its surface shifting with advanced camouflage. Psychic-nullification tech hummed faintly around it, dampening its presence.
I leapt, phased through the air, and caught it.
“I knew it,” I said aloud as I disassembled it midair. “You with the SRC?”
The drone’s internal systems were sophisticated. Adaptive cloaking. Signal encryption. Spatial shielding. I examined it quickly, then reassembled it piece by piece, careful not to damage its core.
“I don’t know who’s piloting you,” I continued, staring directly into its lens, “but I know this is remote-controlled.”
The camera adjusted slightly.
“Let’s make a deal,” I said. “Bring me somewhere I can access functional tech parts. I need to repair my gear. In return, I’ll consider whatever you want, as long as it isn’t ridiculous. We’ll negotiate face to face.”
The drone hovered in place for a second.
Then it bobbed up and down.
I took that as a yes.
I followed the drone across continents that no longer resembled continents.
Cities blurred into wastelands of twisted steel and hollowed towers. Highways ended abruptly in craters. Entire districts were swallowed by sinkholes or warped by whatever aftershock Rodney’s fall had triggered. The drone maintained a steady pace, occasionally pausing to ensure I remained within visual range.
Along the way, I encountered creatures that were not undead.
Mutated things.
They were twisted amalgamations of flesh and adaptation, as if the ecosystem itself had tried to correct the imbalance Rodney created and overcompensated. Some had elongated limbs and too many eyes. Others moved like packs of feral animals but pulsed with faint bioluminescence. They were aggressive, territorial.
They were also not particularly difficult.
My intangibility cut through them like a conceptual blade. Most never understood what killed them. A few attempted to flee once they sensed something wrong, but I ended those encounters quickly. I did not linger. I was not here to cleanse the world.
The drone occasionally lost power, and I salvaged energy cells from collapsed infrastructure to keep it running. In one ruined garage, I found the remains of a motorbike. It took me hours to reassemble it into something functional, rewiring the engine with jury-rigged components and stabilizing it with spatial freezing so it would not rattle apart on uneven terrain.
A week passed before the drone finally led me somewhere different.
A town.
Not intact, but rebuilding.
Cadavers were still scattered in the outskirts, remnants of Rodney’s dominion. Closer to the center, people worked in coordinated groups, digging mass graves. As rites were spoken over bodies, I watched souls untether and fade without my involvement.
It was strange seeing that process without being the catalyst.
I would have to get used to perceiving souls.
A blur descended from the sky.
A blond boy, no older than fifteen, landed awkwardly in front of me, grinning ear to ear. “Guys, the hero is here!”
I frowned slightly at the title.
He stared at me with unfiltered awe. “Oh my god, it’s really him! Mr. Grim, can I get your autograph?”
“Grim?” I asked.
He scratched the back of his head. “Short for Grim Reaper. You reaped that monster, right? We saw everything. If that offends you, I can tell everyone to stop calling you that.”
Before I could respond, more voices erupted.
“It’s the Grim Reaper!”
“The hero who beat the Dark Lord!”
“He came back!”
“Sir hero, over here!”
The boy winced apologetically. “Sorry about the reception. We didn’t expect you.”
“Out of the way!” a voice barked.
An elderly woman barreled through the small crowd with alarming speed. One of her hands was a prosthetic, industrial and grease-stained. She stopped in front of me, breathing hard but grinning.
“Holy hell, you really came,” she said. “So, stranger, you brought my drone back.”
I glanced at the hovering machine.
“Repairs?” she added eagerly. “I’m your gal. But, uh… can you play along for a bit?”
She grabbed me by the collar, leaning in as if to embrace me while actually whispering into my ear. “These people need hope. We’ve been underground for eighty years. There are probably other bunkers out there, but we’re the only ones who know that old monster is gone. Rebuilding isn’t just walls. It’s self-esteem.”
I stepped back slightly. “I’m in a hurry.”
“I know, I know,” she rushed. “Just one night. Make it part of the deal. They’ve never seen a superhero before.”
“I’m not a superhero,” I said.
She blinked. “You don’t have those where you’re from?”
“I’m a supervillain.”
Her face drained of color.
The blond boy’s eyes sparkled. “Whoa! That’s even cooler. Can I be a villain too? I can fly. See?”
He lifted off the ground a few feet, wobbling proudly.
I stared at him.
Was the concept of heroes and villains foreign here? Perhaps culture had withered alongside the surface world. The old woman clearly understood the term. The boy did not.
I exhaled.
“I’m kidding,” I said flatly. “I’m neither. Just a perfectly average guy.”
That was the safest lie I could offer.
The old woman laughed too loudly. “Ha! Yeah. Average.”
“My name’s Krissy,” she added, wiping her prosthetic hand on her overalls before offering it. I shook it carefully.
The boy leaned toward me, stage-whispering loudly, “Average, he says.”
Inside their budding town square, a massive screen hung from a salvaged billboard frame. It replayed my fight with Rodney from multiple angles. They were drone footage, zoomed shots of me phasing one creature and another, flashes of undead swarms collapsing.
Krissy followed my gaze. “I was on routine patrol with my drones when you two started tearing up the skyline. I couldn’t resist recording it. Before I knew it, it was live in the bunker. People needed something to believe in.”
She studied me more closely. “Stranger, I don’t care what you’ve done before. Villain or not. Would you mind telling me who you are? You don’t have to, but…”
Around us, people pretended to focus on their tasks while stealing glances at me. They kept a respectful distance, almost reverent.
It felt wrong and heavy.
Without quite intending to, I spoke.
“My name is Nicholas Caldwell,” I said slowly. “A sinner who wished to expiate himself.”
The words surprised even me.
For once, I did not hide behind Eclipse.