Chapter 48: Drivel
"What?"
"I said I won’t do it."
Miles shook his shoulder lightly, pushing Jayce’s arm off. The boy’s brows rose; he frowned in a mix of confusion and desperation.
"You’re joking, right? It’s the only way out of here."
"I don’t care."
"Don’t you understand? You’ll di-"
A girl’s voice interrupted him from behind.
"Don’t waste your breath on him. Do it now, Jayce."
Suddenly, a sharp pain pierced through Miles’s skull, causing his vision to blank out for a moment. Before he could recover, an impossibly heavy force slammed into his face, sending him headfirst into a crate behind him.
The wood shattered on contact. Broken pieces of its shattered form flew into the back of his head and face.
His mind felt just as scattered as the wood, frantically rushing to fit the pieces of what was happening together.
There was pain from his ribs, a part of his face, and the back of his head.
He’d been hit.
The only one near him had been Jayce.
He’d been hit by Jayce.
That realization pierced through the fog of his dizzy mind as he forced his eyes open, pushing some wooden fragments off his lids.
His vision was blurry, the world around him reduced to smudges. The sound of struggle mixed with that of a voice talking and reached his ears as a wave of gibberish. The pain emanating from all over his body did little to help his focus.
He blinked until the colors sharpened into shapes, the stability of their forms balancing his grip on reality. His head lay on a wooden board, eyes facing the door they’d entered the room through.
’There.’
That was his first proper thought. It was there the struggle was coming from.
Maxwell and his friend had made their moves.
Maxwell lunged towards Grimm, aiming for his gun, and Brandon standing near him. Grimm, already tensed, fired the moment he did, only to miss, grazing the boy’s shoulder and just pinging off it as though it were made of rock.
His next shot resulted in an empty click. He barely raised his gun in time to block Maxwell afterwards, only to fall from the force behind the strike.
Maxwell’s friend was dealing with Morgan, or just about done with him. He pulled his hand back from the man’s stomach as he collapsed, coughing blood.
Morgan, Grimm, and Brandon all had dazed looks on their faces.
"...Don’t want to hurt you."
It was only then his ears picked up on the voice still talking to him. Jayce.
Shifting his gaze towards him, Miles found the boy standing above him, mumbling words half to himself, half to him.
Blood dripped off his lowered fist.
"You can’t just make stupid decisions, Miles. Y-you have a family out there. You have to reach them. Something must be clouding your judgment. Yes, that must be it."
He glanced at his bloodied fist, then at Miles, and finally at his teammates struggling up front.
"Just... just stay there. We can talk about this when I’m done with them."
He moved to step forward.
Miles kept his gaze locked on the boy’s side profile, that numbing sense of disconnection flowing through him once again.
It hurt to think, let alone move. But his stream of thought had reorganized itself under that numbness.
His current state was objectively bad. The ambush had completely disoriented him, even knocking his control over [Delusion], sending the suppressed pain in his ribs ratcheting up again.
It would be hard to stand up in this state, even with his current state of mind. There was no telling that he wouldn’t be sent back down.
’The problem is that pain.’
The one that had pierced through his mind at the start, and what he was sure had made Grimm miss his shot. It had to be an ability.
Jayce continued moving forward as he stared; soon he would be out of his reach.
If he joined his group in dealing with the others, the situation would deteriorate to nigh impossibility. At best, they would leave just Miles alive.
’What then?’
Leave his life in the hands of a maniac like Maxwell. Survive in the group by only depending on Jayce’s kindness, or more accurately, serve as a vessel for his guilt.
He felt not pity, but desperation from Jayce’s offer. A want to share his burden, his blame with someone else. Someone he felt was simple, someone he felt would understand him.
But that person didn’t exist. That person was not Miles.
Veneers. Masks sharing drivel with themselves for over a year and calling it friendship, when it was all a farce.
Perhaps that was all it was, perhaps that was all it had ever been.
In the face of that possibility, in the face of such a fate, Miles knew he could never let the boy get away from him. Everything else suddenly seemed to matter little.
He imagined himself as naught but a puppeteer shielded in a strictly mechanical body. That the pain did not exist, for it merely affected a puppet under his command.
He imagined that his body wasn’t his at all. Then,
[Delusion]
A crushing force pressed against his mind, nearly knocking him out completely. It wiped out every other thought, with only one managing to survive the onslaught.
’Stop him.’
The numbness consumed him entirely, cutting off the pain completely and leaving his body cold and alien to his senses.
His right hand still gripped tightly on his bat even through his pain, but he didn’t use it. Instead, he stretched his free hand to the side, struggling due to the unfamiliarity of his body before finally touching a wooden plank near him.
The moment he did, he wrapped his fingers around it. Then, right as Jayce stepped out of his batting range, he flung it, sending it out of his hands and into the boy’s shin.
It struck true, sending Jayce onto one knee. In a mix of shock and pain, he looked around for the source, only to stop when his gaze landed on Miles.
Miles had already pushed himself up on one knee, feeling nothing but dizziness and a sense of lightness in his head.
He met Jayce’s shocked gaze with single-minded focus.