Chapter 269: Friend
It was long past midnight.
After hours of dissecting maps, calculating supply lines, and tracing patrol routes, the team had finally dispersed into their private quarters branching off the central hall. The emergency lights in the main corridor had been dimmed to a dull, amber hum to conserve generator fuel.
In the third room on the left, Hide lay on a narrow canvas cot, staring unblinkingly at the damp concrete ceiling.
His body was exhausted down to the marrow.
Every instinct told him he needed to sleep. Yet, his eyes remained wide open.
‘Tsk, tsk, tsk…’
The sound slithered through his skull.
‘Look at you. Still lying on a cot like a good little boy, staring at the ceiling, pretending you belong among them.’
Hide squeezed his eyes shut, his jaw clenching until his molars ground audibly in the quiet room. He turned onto his side, pulling the coarse woolen blanket over his shoulders, trying to force his thoughts to sleep.
‘Oh, don’t ignore me now, Hide,’ the voice chuckled. ‘You’ve been playing deaf for days. Ever since that pretty little fortress collapsed into dust. But you know I’m right. You’ve always known.’
Hide reached up, pressing the palms of his hands firmly against his temples, his breath turning shallow and rapid.
‘Shut up,’ Hide snarled in his mind. ‘Get out of my head.’
‘Why should I leave my own home?’ the voice purred, dripping with amusement. ‘When you punched through Arius’s chest… when you held his life between your claws and felt his terror… didn’t your blood sing? You said it yourself: you are the embodiment of death. You didn’t pity him. Crushed his skull because you wanted to do it. That was your true self, Hide. Not this pathetic, soft fool pretending to care about an agency plaque in the dirt.’
Hide’s fists tightened, his nails biting deep into his palms.
The voice had been whispering to him the entire way across the continent. When he saved Kiko, the voice had hissed at him to slit her throat and leave her corpse for the corporate dogs. When they walked the coastal road, it urged him to snap her neck from behind, whispering that she was a spy, a liability waiting to betray him.
He had resisted it then. But now, in the stillness of the bunker, the whispers grew deafening.
‘And now look at the company you keep,’ the voice mocked, a sharp hiss slicing through his thoughts. ‘A crippled mage relying on steel gears to walk. An fool swinging a hammer. A girl playing with daggers.’
‘They are my friends,’ Hide thought, his chest heaving.
‘They are corpses, Hide! Walking, breathing corpses!’ the voice roared with sudden, vicious cruelty. ‘Just like Risa! You promised to protect her, too. You fed her medicine and promised her the world—and the second a real threat arrived, she was dead right in front if you. Without that little blue screen holding your hand, you are nothing. You couldn’t save her, and you won’t save them. They will bleed, and their blood will be on your hands.’
“Stop,” Hide whispered aloud, his voice a rasp.
‘Why should I? It runs in your blood, after all,’ the voice sneered, the mockery turning into pure, foul venom. ‘Your mother was just as pathetic. Erin Volter, the great researcher! Bleeding out like a slaughtered pig on the living room rug, begging beasts for mercy. She was weak, she died like a dog, and you are just her worthless little—’
“SHUT THE FUCK UP!”
Hide exploded off the cot.
A concussive flare of mana erupted from his body shattering the glass water pitcher on the table into a thousand pieces. The air in the tiny bedroom turned icy and suffocating, the shadows on the walls writhing like rabid serpents.
He couldn’t stay in the room. The concrete walls felt like they were collapsing inward, squeezing him.
Hide bolted through the doorway. Moving with frantic speed, he blurred past the darkened common area, slipped through the partially unlatched blast door, and sprinted up the abandoned industrial stairwells.
He burst out through the ventilation gap into the open night air of Area 5.
The surface was a wasteland of silence and far away movements and screams.
Above him, the sky was covered by dense, rolling clouds of soot, ash, and chemical smog. Choked behind the murk, almost obscured, hung an almost-new moon—a razor-thin, sickly pale sliver of silver barely piercing the darkness.
Hide didn’t stop running until he reached a half-collapsed concrete plaza behind the textile warehouse—an open, desolate graveyard of foundations and tangled heaps of rusted iron girders.
BOOM!
Hide drove his bare fist straight into a freestanding, four-ton concrete pillar.
The thick stone exploded outward in a shower of gravel and dust.
CRASH!
He didn’t stop. Grabbing a twisted, ten-foot steel beam, Hide wrenched it from the ground with pure physical strength and hurled it across the plaza, smashing an overturned freight container in half. He lunged at another pile of masonry, his boots tearing into the earth, his dark mana lashing out in uncontrolled arcs that sliced through stone and brick alike.
He smashed. He tore. He destroyed.
He pounded his fists into the rubble until the stone cracked, until the skin over his knuckles split and bled, trying with every ounce of his being to drown out the maddening roar inside his own brain.
“Hide! Stop!”
A desperate voice cut through the sound of falling concrete.
Hide froze, his right arm pulled back to strike another slab.
Chest heaving violently, sweat dripping down his temples, Hide slowly turned around. His silver hair was wild and dusted with grey powdered stone, and his eyes burned with an erratic mix of violet and blue.
Sora looked terrified as her gaze went around.
She wore a dark, simple tunic over her trousers. The freezing night wind whipped her dark hair across her face as she looked at the wreckage around him.
Her eyes slowly shifted, now filled with an unbearable, aching sorrow.
“Sora…” Hide breathed, his voice raw, his bloody knuckles trembling at his sides. “Go back inside. Don’t… don’t come near me right now.”
Sora didn’t take a single step back.
Instead, she took a step forward, her boots crunching over the shattered gravel.
“I heard the door slam,” she said softly, her voice steady against the cold gusts. “I followed you.”
“I told you to leave!” Hide snapped. The dark mana around his boots flared violently, scorching the stone. “Can’t you see?! I can’t… I can’t keep it down! If you stay here, I might hurt you! Maybe… just like Walter said I killed the others. Perhaps its true and I am lying.”
Sora didn’t flinch and closed the distance between them, stepping right into the aura of swirling dark mana until she was standing inches from his chest.
Without hesitation, she reached out and caught his bleeding hands in her own.
Her palms were warm. Her grip was firm and unyielding, entirely heedless of the dark sparks stinging her skin.
“You won’t hurt me, Hide,” she said, looking straight into his trembling violet eyes. “Right?”
Hide’s breath hitched. The terrifying pressure rolling off his frame began to falter, sputtering like a dying flame. He looked down at their joined hands—his skin stained with soot and fresh crimson, hers pale and clean, holding him as if he were something precious.
‘See, she is trying to manipulate you. She doesn’t even know you. She just wants to use you.’
“Why are you doing this?” Hide whispered, his throat tightening. “You don’t understand what’s happening to me… what I’m turning into.”
“Then tell me,” Sora urged gently, stepping closer until her forehead nearly brushed his shoulder. “Stop fighting it alone. You came back to us, Hide, but you’re still acting like you’re trapped in that cage.”
Hide stood frozen beneath the dim, dusty sliver of the moon.
The silence between them stretched.
“There’s a voice in my head,” Hide confessed, his voice barely louder than the wind. “It keeps telling me to destroy everything. It keeps telling me to kill everyone.”