As I fall back toward the earth, the blood frenzy consuming my mind hits an all-time, unprecedented high. The voices in my head are no longer just screaming; they are vibrating through my very marrow, a choral symphony of pure, unadulterated madness. I am a meteor of flesh and bone plummeting toward the abyss, and the world around me has narrowed into a terrifyingly sharp, hyper-focused extreme.
Through the passive greyscale lens of my Fearmonger ability, the world is stripped of its vibrant hues, leaving only the stark, uncompromising reality of contrast, shadow, and destruction. I can see thousands of feet below me into the dying city of Baelin, and the level of devastation is almost incomprehensible.
Massive portions of the canyon walls have been completely shattered. Gigantic slabs of ancient, carved bedrock are shearing off the sides of the gorge, tumbling down into the dark like the severed limbs of a stone titan. The mountain itself the city is built into looks dangerously close to a catastrophic structural failure, on the verge of collapsing inward and burying everything under millions of tons of rock. The intricate, crisscrossing web of wooden platforms, stone terraces, and suspension bridges is being systematically eviscerated. The combined, cataclysmic power of two Elite forces... Helix and the Midnight Rose... colliding in a confined space is tearing the architecture to ribbons.
Fires burn everywhere. In my vision, the flames are stark, blindingly white patches of intense heat that devour the wooden structures like hungry ghosts. Entire districts are just simply gone.
I look at the cascading ruin and come to a cold, undeniable conclusion: most, if not all, civilian life in this city has perished. Those that are still alive will probably not remain that way.
I alone have probably, indirectly, killed hundreds today.
As I tumble down through the freezing, howling wind, I sneer. Falling towards the earth with no way out, how fucking annoying. I brace my muscles, preparing myself for the unimaginable, concussive pain of being splattered into a million wet pieces against the canyon floor. I find myself morbidly curious, wondering just how far the Regenerator mark's limits stretch. Can it bring me back from a red stain on the rocks? Will the golden threads try to weave a puddle of meat back into a man?
I throw my head back and laugh. It is a manic, grating, and utterly insane sound that tears my throat raw before it is instantly snatched away by the roaring wind.
If the power fails, I think, wildly amused by my own impending doom, it'll no longer be my problem anyway.
The ground is rushing up fast. The details of the cracked stone and the shattered debris become painfully clear. Five hundred feet. Three hundred. One hundred.
I am about forty feet above the ground, bracing for the explosive end, when my sensory net flares with a strange, sickening prickle.
The air unfolds.
I am suddenly, violently teleported right out of the open sky.
The transition is instantaneous, but the cessation of momentum is brutal. I am slammed backward into something hard and unyielding. The spatial whiplash going from a terminal velocity free-fall to a complete, dead stop in the span of a microsecond induces a wave of vertigo so severe that my brain simply shuts off to protect itself.
I pass out.
It is only for a second a fleeting, dark blip in my consciousness but when I come to, my head is spinning, my ears are ringing, and I am laying flat on my back on a slab of cold stone.
I blink the dark spots from my vision, staring straight up.
Three obsidian masks are looking down at me.
Three.
Teleb is standing in the center, his mask still bearing the jagged, spider-web fracture from our earlier clash. Through that crack, his single, bright blue eye looks over me, gleaming with a dark, satisfied amusement. To his right is the female teleporter, her mask pristine and featureless.
And to his left stands a new one. A third Petal.
I sneer, my lips pulling back over my teeth as the rage flares hot and immediate in my chest. I engage my core, attempting to roll to my feet, to summon my sword, to rip the throats out of all three of them.
I can't move. Teleb has acted. While I was unconscious for that single second, he used his Mark. My wrists, my ankles, and my waist are entirely encased in thick, seamless layers of heavy, unyielding metal. The steel is bolted directly into the stone slab beneath me. It is a perfect, inescapable cage molded perfectly to the contours of my body.
I strain against the bindings, the muscles in my arms and legs bulging, the Fearmonger's physical augmentation screaming in protest, but the metal doesn't budge. A momentary, icy spike of panic pierces through the blood-drunk frenzy. I am trapped.
The new, smaller Petal reaches up. She grips the edges of her featureless black mask and pulls it off.
It reveals a beautiful girl, no older than I am. Her skin is porcelain pale, devoid of the grit and ash of the battlefield. Her hair is a stark, shocking white, pulled back tightly into an intricate, elegant bun that exposes the sharp angles of her jaw. But it is her eyes that arrest my attention.
They are a devastatingly bright, luminous pink.
They are unnatural just like all Elite eyes are. It's one of the claims we have to the divine the revoking of human eyes being the first thing to go. They glow with a soft, hypnotic luminescence that stands out vividly, even bleeding through the monochromatic filter of my greyscale vision. They are far more striking, far more piercing than the pink eyes of my least favorite Proctor back at the academy.
The sudden unmasking makes me pause for a microsecond. A deeply rooted, instinctual alarm bell rings in the back of my mind. Why would she take it off these people are all clearly in some type of cult.
I get a terrible, creeping bad feeling.
Before I can fully rationalize why looking into those pink eyes feels so dangerous, I squeeze my own eyes shut. I clamp my eyelids down hard, grinding my teeth together, and strain against the metallic bindings with every ounce of kinetic force I can generate. The steel groans, but holds.
A soft, melodic chuckle breaks the silence.
It is the teleporter. She speaks for the first time, her voice clear despite the obsidian mask, finally confirming herself to be female.
"This guy is not real," she says, her tone dripping with amused disbelief as she watches me fight the immovable steel.
Then, the new girl speaks. Her voice is soft and airy.
"He is being consumed by his own power," the pink-eyed girl says, her words carrying a strange, resonant echo that seems to vibrate inside my own skull rather than the air around us. "I need his eyes opened."
Teleb grunts in acknowledgment.
I feel the shift in the air, the displacement of mass, a split second before the blow lands. Teleb's metal-gauntleted fist slams directly into my sternum with the force of a sledgehammer.
The impact caves the breath out of my lungs. I grunt loudly, blood welling up in the back of my throat, but I keep my eyes clamped stubbornly shut. I refuse to look at her. I refuse to play their game.
"Stubborn boy," Teleb murmurs.
Suddenly, I feel a terrifying, localized pressure hovering just millimeters above my face. Teleb is manipulating the ambient metal debris around us.
Schlick.
I scream.
He sends tiny, razor-sharp slivers of steel driving straight through my closed eyelids, burying the microscopic shrapnel deep into my corneas. The pain is absolute, a blinding, white-hot agony that detonates behind my forehead. The vitreous fluid of my eyes is punctured, and the darkness behind my eyelids explodes into a kaleidoscope of torment.
And then, the Regenerator activates.
The golden light flares beneath my ruined eyelids. The divine vitality aggressively attempts to reconstruct the shredded tissue of my eyes, but the metal slivers are still lodged inside as Telb forces it to stay not allowing my power to force the foreign object out. The healing threads fuse the newly generated flesh directly around the jagged steel.
Teleb twists the metal.
The newly healed tissue is shredded all over again. The cycle repeats. Destroyed. Healed around the blade. Torn open again.
It is a horrific, localized loop of endless torture. The feeling of my eyes regenerating over and over again, only to be instantly lacerated by the embedded steel, is too much for even my fractured, madness-fueled mind to bear. The agony overrides my willpower.
I gasp, my jaw unhinging in a silent scream of pure torment, and my eyes snap open.
The metal slivers dissolve into dust as Teleb releases his hold, allowing the golden light to finally, fully repair my vision.
The world snaps back into greyscale focus.
The girl with the pink eyes is already moving. She climbs directly onto the stone slab, straddling my waist, her knees pressing into my ribs. The sheer audacity of her proximity, the utter disrespect of mounting me while I am bound, pisses me off even more. The fury in my chest burns so hot I feel like my heart is going to melt through my ribcage.
She leans down, her pale hands reaching out to gently caress the sides of my face. Her touch is ice cold.
She stares directly down into my newly healed, violet eyes.
Instantly, I feel it.
It isn't a physical sensation. It is an invasion. A greasy, slippery breach of my mind. I can feel her actively trying to fuck with my head, tracing the outlines of my memories, probing the edges of the Fearmonger's rage, searching for a seam in my psyche to rip open.
I sneer, spitting a wad of blood that goes directly into her face.
"Get the fuck out of my head, you witch," I snarl, my voice vibrating with a demonic, echoing malice.
She doesn't flinch. She just smiles. It is a sweet, entirely innocent smile that makes my stomach churn with revulsion.
"You are such a tragic character Ayato Daath, do you even know what you fight for?"
She leans her body down further, closing the distance between us until her nose touching mine. She keeps her devastatingly bright pink eyes locked in a dead, unblinking stare with my violet ones. Her lips hovering above mine.
But the closer her face gets to mine, the more wrong everything feels. I can feel my memorizes actively being searched and examined one by one she rips open my mind.
I throw my head back against the cold stone slab, fighting the creeping, paralyzing numbness in my brain, and I scream in absolute, helpless anger.