The grass was painted deeply crimson under the pale moon, each blade gleeming with fresh blood yet to soak into the earth. Sei ran through the clearing, breaths coming in ragged, irregular gasps that tore at his throat like fibre glass. Sixteen years of pathetic, worthless life, all now coming to an end.
His right arm was gone. A single, clean, uninterrupted strike at the shoulder had taken it, so precise that the sheer speed of the sword partially cauterised the wound. Possibly the reason he could even make it this far. But far from enough. Blood gushed out with each desperate, slowing heartbeat, a trail of blood so plentiful that even a blind man could follow. The pain left only a hollow cold spreading through his chest.
But the centre of his agony came from his back. A deep, cross wound cut all the way to bone, severed muscles visibly sliding against each other with every haphazard stumbling step. He could feel the strenuous, desperate running further separating the already clinging flesh in a grotesque rhythm matching his laboured breathing. Vision blurring with tears of pain, of fear, of desperation, of the certainty that he was about to die alone in the forest like an animal.
"Plea- please," the boy sobbed, words barely audible over the sound of his own ragged breathing. "Anyone... somebody... please... he—..."
The forest offered no solace. Only the steady, undisturbed footsteps of his five pursuers, unhurried in their pursuit. They had no need to rush. Their prey was already dead, even if his body had yet to notice.
They wore full black, faces hidden behind equally dark masks, but he knew them. The dark purple sigil on the left shoulder had burnt itself into his memory with the clarity only possible at death's doorstep. He'd seen the sigil countless times.
The Zehri Clan, an offshoot of the same clan Sei was born in. However, the Zehri, like most of those in the martial realm, would follow the orders of those above them.
Sei crashed face first into dirt, tasting blood and earth as his foot caught on an unfortunately placed root. He had no strength left to rise, his remaining arm trembling beneath him. Fingers clawing needlessly into grass as if to try and pull himself to safety.
The footsteps finally stopped. Five shadows surround him in the moonlight, forming a circle around him.
"Still alive, are you?" One chuckled, slightly muffled by his mask. "Tenacious little cockroach, aren't you?"
Another jogged up, kicking him in the ribs, not enough to kill him, not even to break bones, just to flip him onto his flayed back. Sei cried out, mud digging into the wound across his back. He stared into the sky, staring at a star that seemed so impossibly distant and so cruelly indifferent.
Their leader stepped forward, boot settling besides Sei's head with deliberate slowness. He was saviouring the moment. Slowly, almost so slow Sei had thought time paused, he drew his sword. The blade catching the moonlight beautifully.
"Any last words?" His voice laced with arrogance, rolling the insult around like fine wine. Evidently his favourite part, just when the target realised their inveitable demise as their fear peaked.
The blade pressed into Sei's throat. The cold steel sharp enough that he could feel the top layer of his skin parting even while resting. The pathetic, worthless, completely unremarkable life of his – sixteen years of being the weakest son of a mediocre clan – is seemingly coming to an end.
Without glory. Without purpose. Just lying in mud in a pile of his own increasing pool of blood, his murderers mock him.
Something within him, some last ember of defiance in the dying ashes of his spirit, sparked to life. With a cough of mainly blood phlegm, using his last crumbs of strength in his dying body to raise his remaining hand, fingers trembling weak and pathetically.
And flipped the assassin off.
The assassin's eyes, although mostly hidden, visibly twitched. A vein bulged prominently in his forehead, even through the small eye slits in the mask. The other assassin went still, completely silent.
"You piece of—" Their leader's voice cracked with rage. The blade is pressing harder against Sei's throat. "You know what? I'll just hack off your head and be done with it."
He raised the sword high, the sword reflecting the light shining from the crimson moons into Sei's eyes. The sword came down imperceptibly fast.
But time stopped.
Well, not stopped. Slowed, Sei's perception accelerated to physiologically impossible speeds; his body, however, remained frozen. He watched the blade's descent with almost painful clarity, watching the blade move, micrometres at a time.
His mind raced in that instant. That was it. No coming back. No saving. No miracle. Just a weak child dying because he was too pathetic to sa-
Then he heard it.
A voice rang inside his head. Cold. Mechanical. Emotionless. Absolute.
What? Sei's thoughts scattered like birds startled by a sudden sound. What was happening? What inheritance? What-
Sei attempted to scream, but his frozen body wouldn't respond. This isn't real. A blood-loss hallucination, a dying brain shutting down, creating fantasies in its final seconds. I'm dying, and my oxygen-starved mind is-
The voice continued, completely uncaring of his frantic panic. Clinical and detached, like a doctor explaining why euthanasia was the better option, why there was no other choice.
Wait. What does that mean? What's going to happen to me? Questions formed desperately in his mind.
The words hit like a physical strike. The implications crashed through his mind like an avalanche.
"Oh yeah, what a great idea," Sei thought hysterically, the mind defaulting to absurdity in face of impossibility. "Why wouldn't you take my body? Why no—" Then once the meaning fully registered, shock flooded through him. "Wait. What?! No! You can't have MY body! It's MINE! You can't take it! You can't! No!"
He screamed within his own mind, flailing against invisible chains binding his consciousness. But there was nothing to fight, nothing to resist, nothing to push back nor grab hold of. Just that cold, indifferent, mechanical voice delivering its sentence.
"No! Stop! You can't do this!" Sei cried out, attempting to throw everything he had against the invasion. But there's not much a drowning man can do against an ocean.
<25%...>
He could feel it happening. Like drowning but in reverse, being pulled down into darkness while something else rises to the surface. Control over his fingers slipped away, nerves reporting to a different system. His lungs breathing without his consciousness, following an unnatural rhythm. His heat beating to a different drum.
<52%...>
"Please! Don't!" Tears that physically couldn't be shed poured through his consciousness like rain through a broken roof. "It's mine! My body is MINE! I don't want to disappear! Please!"
<74%...>
The world faded for Sei. Not the physical world – his eyes still saw the assassin's blade descending in that seemingly endless moment. But his connection to that world, his ability to touch it, to influence it, to feel it, to exist in it – all dissolving.
<99%...>
"Please..." A final, desperate whisper in the darkness of his own mind, a prayer to gods he'd never believed in. "Don't... please... don't do this... don't take it from me..."
Sei felt himself falling. Not physically; his body lay motionless in that instant, suspended in the heartbeat before death. But his consciousness plummeted into an abyss within himself, one even he himself did not know existed. Pushed down into a tiny corner within his mind, a prison cell made of his own flesh, bone and blood.
A prison with walls he couldn't see and bars he couldn't touch.
The last thing he experienced was the sensation of a grin spreading from ear to ear, a smile he wasn't making, using muscles he couldn't control any longer. A smile that felt so utterly wrong, predatory and hungry, filled with joy at violence yet to come.
A monster's smile.
Then darkness swallowed him while Sei disappeared into the prison of his own body, a floating, metre-by-metre screen of his body's vision his only solace. Screaming soundlessly in a void that would hold him for centuries to come.
Time finally resumed to normal.
The assassin's blade stabbed deep into the ground, cutting into the space Sei's throat once was.
But Sei, or rather the thing now wearing his skin, was no longer there.