Yes... yes... scream! Scream for me!"
Keruim's smile was a grotesque, jagged line carved into his own face. It began to slip, not out of regret, but because the muscles in his cheeks were failing under the sheer force of his manic joy. His jaw ached, his teeth bared in a permanent snarl of triumph as he watched the Veteran dissolve.
"HELP! SOMEBODY HELP!"
The plea was cut short. Suddenly, a massive, heavy weight collided with Keruim's small, malnourished torso. The impact was like being hit by a runaway carriage. Keruim went flying, his thin frame soaring through the air before his back slammed into the cold, jagged stone wall of the cage with a sickening, hollow thud. The breath left his lungs in a single, desperate wheeze.
"wade!, wade, are you okay? What the fuck happened to you?!"
Liezell's voice didn't just shout; it shattered the silence of the cage. He scrambled toward his friend on his hands and knees, his eyes wide with a terror that Keruim had never seen in a soldier before. They had known each other since the trenches of childhood—two orphans who had survived by eating rats and stealing from the dead. But as Lyle reached out to touch his companion's shoulder, his hand recoiled as if burned.
It was too late. The transformation was absolute. From the soles of his feet up to his hips, from his calloused fingertips to his broad shoulders, Wade was no longer a man. He was a heap of quivering, translucent slime—liquefied flesh that hummed with the lingering resonance of Keruim's power. The smell was unbearable, a mix of ozone and scorched copper.
Unable to stomach the sight of his best friend turning into a puddle of biological waste, liezell turned his gaze toward the small figure slumped against the wall.
"What the fuck did you do to him?!" Liezell roared. His grief transformed instantly into a blinding, white-hot rage. Liezell wasn't like the others; he was 220 pounds of pure military muscle, a product of the empire's brutal conditioning. To him, Keruim was nothing more than a twig to be snapped.
Liezell charged. There was no resistance Keruim could offer.
BAM.
A fist the size of a mallet collided with the side of Keruim's head. His world exploded into a kaleidoscope of red and black. He hit the floor, his ears ringing with a high-pitched whine that drowned out the sounds of the mine. As Keruim groaned, trying to find his bearings through the blinding pain, he felt massive, calloused hands wrap around his throat. They felt like iron cables tightening, cold and final.
"Ack... cauck... h-hh..."
"You fucking monster! How could you do this to him?! He was the only good thing left in this hellhole!" Liezell's voice was thick, choked with pure, unadulterated hatred. He squeezed. Harder. He wasn't just trying to kill a boy; he was trying to crush the very concept of the horror he had just witnessed.
Keruim's twelve-year-old feet left the ground. He dangled in the air, a puppet with its strings cut. The pressure in his skull became unbearable. He could feel his pulse throbbing behind his eyes, a frantic drumbeat counting down his final seconds.
"I will kill you for this! I'll snap your neck and feed you to the rats!" Liezell screamed into his face, flecks of spit hitting Keruim's bloodied skin.
Keruim's eyes began to leak, but they weren't tears of sadness. Within seconds, the clear fluid turned pink, then a deep, visceral red as the capillaries in his sockets began to implode from the sheer atmospheric pressure Liezell was applying to his carotid arteries. His pale, sickly skin turned a bruised, eggplant purple.
Heh...
A memory flashed through Keruim's fading consciousness, vivid and sharp as a razor. He remembered the girl. The young girl in the village whose life he had ended the same way. He remembered the way her small hands had flailed against his chest, the way her legs had kicked in a rhythmic, desperate dance. He remembered the "beautiful melody" of her windpipe collapsing.
In his final moments of consciousness, Keruim began to mimic her. He reached out with his small, dirt-stained fingers and began to scratch at Liezell's massive, muscular arms. He followed the exact movements he had seen her make. He tried to grab hold of the air, to suck in just a single molecule of oxygen, but the world was closing in.
He realized then that he and the girl were finally the same. They were one. Every frantic twitch, every desperate gasp that ended in a wheeze—he was living her final seconds. The scratches he made drew blood that trickled down Liezell's arms and dripped onto the stone floor, adding a new, wet note to the melody of the cave. His eyes were now entirely crimson, the whites vanished behind a mask of burst vessels.
Keruim's body went limp. His heart gave one final, violent spasm—the brain's last-ditch effort to signal for help that wouldn't come. Then, the high-pitched ringing in his ears faded into a heavy, suffocating silence. The world simply blinked out.
"You fucking bitch!" Liezell yelled, his voice echoing off the cavern walls as he stared at the "corpse" of the twelve-year-old in his hands. He felt no remorse. He felt only the hollow ache of Wade's loss. "I hope you rot in the deepest pit of hell!"
With a grunt of disgust, he dropped Keruim's body like a bag of trash and delivered one final, bone-breaking kick to the boy's ribs out of sheer, agonizing rage.
"Help... me... Liezell..."
The faint, wet whisper from the corner of the cage made Liezell's heart stop. The rage evaporated, replaced by a cold, numbing dread. He rushed back to the center of the cage, back to Wade—his childhood friend, the boy who had shared his only piece of bread when they were starving in the military orphanage.
"I'm sorry... Wade, I'm here! I'm right here!"
Liezell's tears hit the stone floor, mixing with the slime that used to be his brother-in-arms. He looked at what was left. It was a nightmare. Wade's legs were gone, dissolved into a soup of calcium and marrow. His arms were stumps of melting muscle. There was no medicine in this mine, no power that could knit this back together. Wade was a soldier; he knew the rules. Without limbs, you were "surplus." You were discarded. You became live bait for the goblin scouting parties.
"Fuck!" Liezell howled at the ceiling. "I shouldn't have just killed that kid! I should have kept him alive and let the goblins peel the skin from his bones while he watched!"
"Liezell... p-please..." Wade's voice was a gurgle. "End it... don't let them... take me like this... i dont want to die"
Liezell's entire body began to shake. He looked around the cage frantically until his eyes landed on a sharp, jagged splinter of bone that had snapped off during the struggle. It was long, white, and tipped with a natural point.
"I'm sorry... the only grace I can give you is a quick end," Liezell whispered, his voice cracking like dry glass. He couldn't be selfish. He couldn't let his best friend suffer the fate of being eaten alive in the dark.
Steeling his soul, Liezell gripped the bone shard with both hands. He positioned it over Wade's chest, right where he thought the heart would be amidst the shifting, melting mass. With a guttural cry of grief, he thrust the splinter downward.
But his hands were shaking too hard. The bone didn't find the heart. Instead, it tore through a lung. Wade didn't die. Instead, he let out a harrowing, high-pitched scream that sounded less like a man and more like a dying animal.
"AHHHHH! IT HURTS!"
"I'M SORRY! I'm so sorry! I missed! I'll fix it, I promise!"
Blood, dark and frothy, began to spew from the hole Liezell had created. Panic took over. Liezell lost his military composure. He became a terrified child again. He picked up the bone splinter and began to stab. And stab. And stab.
He wasn't a killer; he was a frantic boy trying to erase his mistake. He stabbed until the only screams remaining in the cage were his own, echoing back at him from the darkness.
"AHHHHHH! FORGIVE ME! WADE, FORGIVE ME!"
Finally, the bone weapon slipped from his bloody fingers and hit the ground with a dull thud. Liezell collapsed. Around him lay two corpses—one a boy he hated, the other a brother he loved. Both lives had been taken by his own hands.
Liezell's teeth began to chatter violently, a physical manifestation of the shock settling into his nervous system. His breaths became shallow, ragged gasps. His mind spun in a dizzying loop of memories. He remembered Wade stealing an extra ration for him when Lliezell was too sick to stand. He remembered Wade taking a lashing from the commander because Liezell had forgotten to polish his boots. Wade wasn't just a friend; he was the only proof Liezell had that he was still human.
"I need to hit something... I need to wake up... this isn't real..."
Liezell began to tear at his own hair, fistfuls of it coming away in his hands as a full-scale panic attack seized his chest. "I couldn't even give him a clean death... I butchered him... his blood is all over me..."
Huff... huff... "I can't breathe... the air is gone..."
As Liezell spiraled into the abyss of his own mind, a small, pale hand reached out from the shadows near the wall. It moved with a slow, predatory grace, fingers closing around the jagged bone splinter Liezell had dropped.
Liezell heard nothing. He was deaf to the world, lost in the image of Wade's screaming face. He didn't hear the soft, barefoot steps on the stone. He didn't see the shadow stretching across his back.
Thump. The footsteps stopped directly behind him.
The bone splinter was raised high, catching the dim, flickering light of the distant torches. With a sudden, violent motion, it was thrust downward. It didn't aim for the heart or the chest. It went straight for the soft, vulnerable meat of Liezell's neck.
C-CRACK.
"Cuh... cuh... gurgle..."
Liezell's hands flew to his throat as he began to choke on his own lifeblood. The world tilted. He didn't understand. He had killed the boy. He had felt the life leave him. So why were there feet in front of his eyes?
He recognized those feet. Small, scarred, and stained with the soot of the mines. They were the feet of the cowering child. The one who cried in the corner. The one who had laughed like a madman while Wade melted.
With the last of his strength, Liezell forced his head up. He wanted to see the face of the demon that had bested him. He wanted to look his killer in the eyes one last time.
But what he saw wasn't a demon. It was a boy. The very boy Liezell had "killed" only minutes ago. The boy whose neck he had crushed.
Keruim him self stood there