Day Two…
Adam and Jane were discussing something among themselves, something that was clearly important, but I wasn't in the mood to listen to their tedious chatter. They always managed to find the dullest topics to dwell on. There they sat, spinning hypotheses over matters that demanded action. Why waste your breath when you could simply get the damn thing done?
My mindset was too radical, too eccentric for them to ever grasp. Always so cautious. Always so tentative. Why the endless trepidation when our advantage was obvious? We outnumbered them most of the time. We had the edge in information. What was so hard to understand about that?
And yet, still, they lingered in their hollow plans–plans destined to crumble at the first shift of circumstance.
It was in that moment, as I silently battled my team's mindset, that I felt it. A tremor. Not in the ground, but in my very being. A primal fear, an ancient pressure demanding that I bow. The sensation made no sense. It was archaic, foreign, and yet my soul understood it instinctively.
My gaze swept the room, straining my heightened perception for any shift in the others, but they remained oblivious. Of course they did. I was the only one actively enhancing myself, pushing my senses to track the presence of other Chosens. It made sense–they weren't even trying.
I waited. Minutes passed, but the tremor only deepened, burrowing into my soul. I wanted to dismiss it, to pretend it was nothing. But I couldn't. No ordinary Chosen could evoke such dread. If one had, then I needed to see it for myself.
Without further thought, I rose, muttered some vague excuse, and tore a Rift toward the direction of that dreadful presence.
*****
General location?
No. The entire fucking area was where it came from.
The first thing my eyes locked onto was the crater. Vast, nearly a two kilometer across, carved into the earth like the aftermath of a divine punishment. Even if I wanted to ignore it, I couldn't. My gaze was inevitably drawn to the figure at its center.
Golden-haired. Radiant. Incandescent.
His presence was tyrannical, demanding I acknowledge him, demanding I know him. My instincts screamed to avert my gaze, but I couldn't. I was compelled to look upon him, to memorize his visage, to bow before his will.
"Remember the name 'Valor', O Echo of the Otherworldly."
The words seared into me like scripture.
Whatever had occurred to lead to this moment was beyond me. But one thing was certain: something impossible was happening. A Rift was opening–but not the kind I knew. This was something higher, grander, obscene. Reality itself was being pried apart.
And then, I saw it. Another monstrosity that stood up to that radiant immolation.
"Echo of the Otherworldly."
A towering, ten-meter figure of obsidian flesh, humanoid in form but impossibly alien in essence. Its presence was suffocating, its physique monstrous in a way no word could fully encompass.
Valor struck. His brilliance collided with the towering Echo, and with a dreadful inevitability, the creature was hurled into that unraveling wound in reality. The tear sealed instantly, as though the world itself feared to remain open.
What came next… I have no true words for. Any attempt to describe it would only poison the essence of what unfolded.
But I can tell you what I felt.
Terror. A terror so absolute it hollowed me out.
Before me was a dance of carnage. A solo performance by a mad god, reveling in slaughter, twirling amid blood and ruin as though in ecstasy. It was an inhuman massacre–so far beyond cruelty that even the word "inhumane" felt frail.
My body betrayed me. My innards twisted. I vomited until nothing remained in me, until only dry heaves wracked my body again and again. And still, I could not stop watching.
I wanted to run away, but I forgot how. My legs, once a part of me, felt like foreign objects; they no longer obeyed me. I wanted to go unconscious, to retreat into the comforting void of nothingness, to erase myself from the sight of this nightmare… but even that escape was denied me. His presence, this bloodlusted creature's suffocating aura, shackled me in place. I was paralyzed by fear so absolute it redefined what fear even meant.
I wanted to help–I swear I wanted to help. Every part of me screamed to act, to lunge, to resist. I wanted to tear apart the hand he used to rip the head from that young boy's body. I wanted to rip out his innards the same way he casually ripped out the innards of that miserable pregnant woman, as if peeling fruit. I wanted to split him in half, just as he split that frail old lady like a broken twig. I wanted to smash his skull until it burst, the same way he ended the life of that infant before its first real cry could even echo. I wanted all of this. I wanted it with a righteous madness. I wanted to help them, to free them from the demented grasp of this son of a devil.
But wanting was not doing. My desire burned bright, yes–but the paralysis I felt was brighter still, an inferno that consumed action itself. I was as helpless as the people I longed to protect. I was as incapacitated as those who screamed and clawed for a salvation that never came. I had power they did not, power that should have made me more than mortal, more than prey, but before this hellish fiend, that power meant nothing. Before him, I was no different than the wailing children whose blood painted the ground.
I was on my knees, drenched in my own vomit, choking on bile and tears as the carnage unfolded before me.
I was on my knees when that mad thing began arranging his trophies, stacking corpses with grotesque artistry until they became a pyramid of the slaughtered, their bodies mangled into unwilling bricks of his creation.
I was on my knees when he placed the final piece–an obsidian statue-like creature whose sheer presence suggested that in life it had been formidable beyond measure. Even now, dead, it radiated a dreadful power. And yet even that aura, that lingering strength, bent low, suffocated beneath the superior will of the fiend who had slain it.
And still, I was on my knees when the monster began to change. His golden radiance dimmed, flickering like a dying flame. His hair, once a blazing crown, dulled to grey. His incandescent luster faded until the godlike presence shriveled into something… ordinary. A man. A mere man.
I stayed there, broken, as his body finally went limp. I watched it tumble into the rubble, discarded, swallowed by stone and ruin, until he vanished from sight.
Disarray flooded me when his suffocating will finally left with him. My mind could no longer form coherent thought. It was as though his absence left a vacuum in my skull. The only thing my spirit clung to was the desperate urge not to gaze upon the macabre monument of flesh he had left behind.
When I realized at last that I could move, that his grip on me had vanished, I ran. I ran without hesitation, without courage, without redemption. I ran without helping. I ran after witnessing hundreds of thousands of innocents slaughtered in cold blood.
And worse, I could have ended it. I could have killed him in his helpless form, just as he had butchered those children, those mothers, those fathers who only wanted to protect their own. He had lain unconscious among the ruins, stripped of his monstrous glow, reduced to fragility. I could have taken his life.
But I didn't.
I didn't because I was afraid. I was afraid of Valor, afraid that his unconscious body was nothing more than a deception, a slumber waiting to rouse the beast again. I didn't dare risk it. I had been broken, and I knew it.
Something in me changed that day.
I still don't know what it was. Or maybe I do.
*****
I told no one what transpired. No one must ever know that I knew.
I had gotten a glimpse of madness that day–a fleeting, searing vision of what true corruption was. I had witnessed not merely cruelty, but the unraveling of what it means to be human. I had seen what Andrew could be, what he truly was beneath the fragile veil of flesh and name: a profane monstrosity stripped of every last trace of humanity. Something unbound, obscene, and inevitable.
And yet, even knowing this, I could not bring myself to kill his helpless form. Something deep within me, something primal and unspoken, refused. It was as though the very fabric of my being revolted against the idea of extinguishing him, even as every logical thought screamed that this inferno should never be allowed to burn again. That paradox tore at me… it still does.
So I have bound myself to a cruel purpose. If I cannot end him, then I must prevent him. I must chain Andrew away from that abyss, hold him back from ever becoming the same golden-haired monster who brought the carnage of Grede.
I must not let Valor rise again.
I mustn't.