"Damnnn.. It hurts."
David gritted his teeth as he plummeted down the endless darkness. All that surrounded him was nothing.. even Pride was nowhere to be found. If he were trapped in a mirror, he should have assumed his real form in a soul region, right?
But David had no chance to think about that. Apart from the nothingness that surrounded him, the other thing that kept him company was pain.
David wasn't falling.. he was being torn apart, both physically and mentally.
It felt less like plummeting through air and more like being violently dragged backward through a column of thick, chemical tar while every nerve ending was simultaneously scraped raw. His last sight was the clinical white light of the hospital room snapping shut, replaced by an absolute, crushing blackness.. not the darkness of a room, but the total absence of light and space.
The pain was instantaneous. It wasn't the searing, focused pain after the initial pact with Pride; this was a total-body trauma, a hundred tiny detonations occurring where his flesh and blood connected to his mind and soul.
His limbs felt like they were being yanked from their sockets while the black veins, only moments ago so prominent, ignited under his skin. He couldn't scream because the act of breathing was gone, replaced by the sensation of his lungs collapsing against the crushing, invisible force of the descent.
An invisible force above him pressed down on him, making his descent too fast and painful, crushing his bones. His eyes saw nothing but darkness, but within him, he saw time move fast, too fast. He was moving, plummeting across the future, past, and present again, again, and again. He could not even tell which was past, present, or future. The visions were extremely disturbing.
The timeline visions were blurry, but he could feel it. The feeling was painful, sending continuous sharp pains to his brain.
The pain continued to mount, twisting David into a knot of agony and confusion. He wasn't just being crushed; he was being unmade.
The crushing force above him intensified, and a new dimension of torment ripped through his brain. His eyes saw only black, but his mind was flash-fried with imagery too vast, too quick, and too significant to process.
He wasn't just falling; he was tearing a hole through the fabric of time itself.
Closing his eyes, he concentrated his focus on the time and tried to glimpse it.
He gritted his teeth and let out a muffled groan. Even concentration caused much more pain.
One moment, he saw a colossal, crystalline city burning under a purple sun, filled with figures that were half-man, half-light. The city was once beautiful but now destroyed, most of the buildings were in ashes. At the center of the city, he saw a beautiful tree that looked devastated, dragging a sack of red mist toward a puddle of silver water.
Was it trying to revive red mist?
Behind them were thousands of dead bodies piled up. On top of them, a silent, bloodied angel sat with no emotions written on their face. Swarming the angel were butterflies made of blood, trapping the angel and making it devoid of movement.
At the end of the city, he stood in the primordial muck, watching two titanic figures. One was glowing, and his real figure couldn't be seen; it radiated a pleasant aura of good emotions, while the other was a shadowy figure radiating dark emotions but mostly... it felt as if the shadowy figure was also sad but more than the tree. They fought with utmost grace as they violently tore something golden from the sky, their struggle shaking the foundations of reality. But then, they stopped abruptly, and reality warped back into the once pristine beauty of the city.
The whole city was made of chrome. The crimson butterflies devoured the angel and disappeared out of sight alongside the countless dead bodies. The tree was already close to the silver water but then totally forgot about the sack of blood and water. It stood still, its aura radiating happiness mixed with sadness.
He didn't have enough time to digest when the force suddenly plummeted him back into darkness, tempting him to keep his eyes open. But he did not.
Again, he found himself out of the darkness, and this time he saw four figures standing on a cliff. Two of the figures–anger and grief–stood at the edge of the cliff. The other two, radiating inhuman, unexplainable emotions, stared at the former. Suddenly, one of the inhuman figures moved through the air itself, exerting pressure on Anger and Grief, making them fall into an endless abyss.
Yet again, before he could digest this vision, he was already back in the darkness. He immediately tightened his eyes shut and waited for the next vision, which didn't take that much time.
This vision was the most disturbing. This time the Sun was battling the Moon. A large chunk of blood, a pool of water, and a green plant were attacking the wind. A dark figure stood at the top of nothingness, watching the bizarre conflict with a calm aura.
"Isn't that–"
Just before David could comment about another figure he saw, he was back in the endless darkness.
The visions were blurry, painful, and fleeting. Every flash of an era sent a spike of pure, raw information that overloaded his nervous system, making the pain in his body irrelevant compared to the screaming in his skull.
Pride? David tried to scream the demon's name internally, searching for the arrogant, steady voice in the chaos, but found nothing but the ringing sound of his own terror.
'Where are you? If this is the soul's region, shouldn't you be free? Shouldn't you have taken your true form?'
The silence was deafening. Pride was gone. The only sign of the pact was the agonizing, electrical burn in the black veins under his skin... the essence holding on by sheer, desperate will, refusing to let David dissolve into the cosmic tear. He was utterly, terrifyingly alone.
The sense of isolation was absolute. He wasn't just risking his life; he was sacrificing his sanity to an endless temporal slideshow of agony.
Just when he felt his consciousness finally fracturing, ready to surrender to the blissful numbness of death, the dizzying time travel stopped.
It wasn't a gentle halt. It was a violent, skull-cracking impact of something solid, coarse, and sharp. The blackness exploded into a blinding white glare, and David's world filled with the sound of thousands of tiny fragments scattering.
That didn't last; he was back in the darkness. But he could see the blinding light above him, and the invisible crushing force had stopped. And below him was another swarm of radiant light.
Bracing himself, he fell into the light....
****
A naked man appeared in the sky.
David tore out of the clouds.
He opened his eyes and saw himself still falling, but this time around, he was plummeting down into a city. Black clouds surrounded him. The sky was red, and the sun was gone.
"Shit!" he cursed as his body hit a metallic surface with extreme force. He groaned as he stood up, standing on the metallic surface. Clouds still surrounded him, and the metallic surface he was standing on was actually the left wing of an airplane. The plane was pure white with no one on it.
Suddenly, the plane shifted awkwardly, making David lose his balance. He slipped on the metal, and his fingers scraped against the surface. He clung instinctively, palms scraping against hot metal, realizing with disbelief that he was sprawled across the fuselage of a flying plane.
He looked down while still holding on to the wing of the plane. He couldn't see the view well from here. The plane was far in the sky.
The wing finally gave off and ripped from the plane, sending the aircraft descending at tremendous speed. David immediately let go of the loosened wing and was once again falling.
He looked down, trying to decipher where he was going to land.
The view was becoming clearer... and he wished it weren't.
Below him sprawled a city that looked like home... but twisted and totally wrong. The streets bent in impossible shapes, like someone had folded a photograph of a city in half and half again until all the lines bled together. Skyscrapers leaned toward him, their glass windows blinking like eyes. Streetlights flickered on and off, stuttering in rhythm with his heartbeat.
He could see flashes of people walking the streets below, only their shadows didn't match their movements. Some walked backward, others floated an inch off the ground. The cars moved but made no sound.
Beneath him, the city was burning. Not like a normal fire... this one was wrong. The flames moved like water, sliding up buildings and curling back down again. The streets twisted, folding in and out of themselves.
The flames weren't burning anything. The fire affected neither the humans nor the buildings.
Wind slapped his face. He could barely keep his eyes open.
"What the hell is happening…" he muttered, voice breaking against the roar.
He spun through the air, body twisting, gravity shifting directions without warning. One second he was falling straight down, the next... sideways.
Then he saw people. Hundreds of them. Floating midair, motionless, faces tilted upward. Their eyes were open but empty... completely white, as if their souls had been wiped clean. They hung there like broken puppets in the storm.
And beneath the red-tinted sky, far away from the human puppets but directly toward his descent... he saw something glinting.
At first, he thought it was a rooftop, some metal frame catching the light. But as he plummeted closer, the shine became clearer. It wasn't glass or zinc. It was blades. Hundreds of them!
A wide pit had formed right in the middle of a main street — a massive maw of sharpened, interlocked metal spikes, stretching wider than any building, pointing straight up at him, ready to pierce into his flesh.
His stomach lurched.
"Wait.. wait ... no, no, no!"
He flailed, twisting midair, trying to shift his body, anything to slow down, to move away, but gravity didn't care. The air around him felt heavy, sticky, pulling him toward the blades.
He tried to maneuver, to stretch his limbs, but the air felt thick, like he was moving through liquid. His descent slowed just enough for him to see something moving beneath the floating bodies.
Ah.. it was just more abnormality... nothing to help him from his sudden death by being shredded apart from a spiky maw in his daughter's mind.
.. What a chilling way to die.
David gritted his teeth, trying to shift away from the maw, but all to no avail.
At this moment, David was already out of the sky and much closer to the blades.
He could see himself reflected in them now... a hundred Davids staring back, each with a different expression. Fear, pain, surrender, and... grief.
Much closer, the blades were much shorter but still deadly. Even deadlier than they looked from the red sky.
The air grew hotter because of the abnormal fire. Once, fire coiled around him but didn't even leave a scratch on his body. David wasn't sure how long he had been falling.
But this was partially a nightmare, and many weird things happen in a nightmare. Take this for example — he had been falling, and sometimes he felt as if he were close to the blades, and in the next second, he felt he was far away.
But David refused to be deceived by illusions because at that moment... his left eye was just a finger away from the tip of a blade....