Chapter 115 God-Complex [Witch]

It had been 112 years, but I remembered that afternoon with the kind of clarity cataracts couldn't steal. Project Tenfold was their answer to everything the world feared and refused to control: a fast, fieldable arsenal of the anomalously dangerous. Ten of us. Ten variables. Ten weapons, calibrated to a probability table the generals bragged about in clean rooms. They promised deterrence; what they delivered smelled like oil, sweat, and the sharp copper of stolen futures.

My. Future.

We rode in a cargo chopper with no windows, just slatted vents that chewed the wind into teeth. The rotors thumped a heartbeat that buried itself in my sternum. We all wore the same prison orange with serial numbers inked onto our left shoulders like small wounds. Mine read 7-241. The men and women around me were silhouettes in that color: a blur of muscle, tattoos, and thin smiles that didn't reach the eyes. From the straps at my wrists to the collar at my throat, everything was built to remind you of ownership.

My class, psychic, was supposed to be subtle. Subtle, and therefore dangerous in a different register. I listened the way a miner listens for a cave-in. Will was the ore; I could tell by the pulse of thought whether it was rich or barren. Around me, I felt the wills of my fellow prisoners like low engines: steady, honed, and sharp. They weren't merely strong in body, for these wills cut like drills through reason. That was why the Project had matched us: not by how we fought, but by who we were when all else was stripped away. Your power didn’t bloom without it. I believed that with the same certainty some believe in God.

Reading surface thoughts was a crude habit; it kept me awake. Anger licked from the man two seats over. It was raw and hot, an animal thinking about breaking bone. Anxiety hummed under the clipper-voiced woman’s sentences, a thin film of panic about collars and consequences. Annoyance sat like a permanent coat on a lanky kid at the back. He was bored with waiting, itching for violence. Some of them thought of escape. Some fantasized about revenge. A few simply counted backward to stay sane.

Then the mission commander moved to the center of the hold. He wore camo and hard lines. The gauntlet he carried caught the overhead light and flashed dangerously.

“I will be your mission command,” he said. “Do you see this shiny gauntlet with your name on it? This is your life! A single flick on the switch and you die! Implanted on your necks are little bombs with nullifier properties. Even if you can regenerate from a drop of blood, have invulnerable skin that would survive even the hottest fire, or intangibility that could ignore physics, you still die! Do you hear me?”

The words were bureaucratic cruelty, trimmed with theatrical threat. A few laughed with short, bitter noises that tasted like ash. One woman spat on the deck. My telepathy found the flicker beneath their bravado: the tiny, private calculation each of them made when faced with immediate mortality. Hope, for most of them, was something that could be rationed in the seconds between orders.

I had my own private countermeasures from habits, tricks, and a mind that could peel the thin skin of thoughts and read the rhythms beneath. It gave me an odd sense of intimacy with those I’d been sentenced beside.

The chopper dipped.

I had been old even then, at least by appearance. Wrinkled skin folded along my cheeks like brittle parchment, my hair a shock of white that refused to obey comb or gravity. They called me ‘hag’ behind my back, sometimes to my face, but the name that endured, the one whispered with real caution, was the Witch. I wore it like a scar, something earned rather than given. My eyes, clouded gray, had seen more than most minds could bear without splintering.

Telepathy-12, they called my classification. A number that meant I could do almost anything the human brain wasn’t meant to do. I could copy my own consciousness into others, replicas that walked, spoke, and thought as I did, until they burned out. I could twist a person’s mind, steer their thoughts so smoothly they’d think it was their own idea. And if I desired, I could melt the gray matter inside their skull like wax under a match.

Once, that power had been freedom. Now, it was my shackle. To be forced into this servitude, collared, numbered, and flown toward another nightmare, was my greatest humiliation.

“This is what’s going to happen,” the tough man continued, voice harsh as gravel. “You are going to obey my orders to the last breath. This gauntlet here, if destroyed, will result in your death. If I die, you die. If you get too far away from me, you die. This mission is important to the SRC. We are hunting an irregular, whose last sightings are confirmed to be in these parts of the forest—”

The hatch behind him screeched open, wind roaring into the cargo bay, whipping our uniforms like restless flags. Sunlight poured in, harsh and golden, framing the dense green sea of forest below.

“He’s dangerous,” the man said, his words almost swallowed by the wind, “and many times more powerful than you.”

A few laughed, thinking he was either lying or making a joke.

I didn’t. Because I could feel him. His mind was an open field to me, littered with barbed thoughts. His fear wasn’t emotional panic… Instead, it was what I called intellectual fear, the kind that reason itself produced. He knew exactly what we were hunting, and he was terrified by the ‘logic’ of it. The numbers didn’t add up. The probabilities failed to map. Something about this target had broken his understanding of control.

So I asked, my voice dry but steady, “What do you mean, irregular?”

He hesitated. His surface thought flickered, ‘Don’t say too much.’ Then he said aloud, “He’s not from this world.”

More laughter, louder this time, filled, mocking disbelief.

It happened too fast and too violently for even my mind to fully comprehend. One heartbeat, the commander was making his speech; the next, he was nothing but a flash of light and a wet crack. A burst of electricity split him apart from outside like a streak of blue, charring flesh and frying metal. His gauntlet popped like a fuse.

The smell came first: burned ozone, scorched meat. The air trembled with residual charge. Sparks skittered along the floor, dancing between our boots and restraints like mischievous spirits. My collar snapped with a sharp ping, and suddenly, everything that had been chained and suppressed inside me unfurled like a storm.

Telepathy roared through my head, a thousand thoughts detonating at once. But before I could even move, my muscles locked. My nerves spasmed under an electric grip. It wasn’t just shock. Instead, it was as if the world itself had seized me by the spine and refused to let go.

And then I saw him.

He stood above the charred remains of the mission commander. It was a man without clothes, without shame. His skin shimmered faintly, alive with veins of blue-white light that crawled beneath his flesh like living lightning. Dark hair hung around his face, caught in the updraft, and his eyes... his eyes were too bright, and too full.

When his thoughts touched mine, I almost screamed.

“From the wreckage of tomorrow,” he said, his voice resonant, layered with static, “I returned with lightning in my hands. The world will kneel in my radiance, or perish in it… Either way, I will keep my promise.”

The moment he spoke, his mind flooded mine… an unwanted tide of visions and fragments. Futures! Worlds dying under storms that never ended. Cities split by thunder. Children born beneath artificial suns. Pain. Endless, recursive pain. I tried to close my mind, to lock the door, but his thoughts were everywhere. I saw him in a hundred different timelines, each iteration fracturing into the next like cracked glass. The strain was unbearable. My nose bled freely, and bile rose in my throat. I bent over, retching, and clutching at the floor as if it could anchor me to sanity.

“What… what are you?” I gasped, though my words were swallowed by the static in my ears.

The others were already moving. One of them stepped forward, grinning. He was a brute whose muscles looked carved from steel. His aura was immense, a storm of arrogance and violence. His thoughts were shallow, simplistic, built on the certainty that his body was unbreakable.

“Who are you supposed to be?” he sneered. “Who sent you? The mob? Which family? After they betrayed me, now they still need me, huh?”

He cracked his knuckles, stepping into a fighter’s stance. The air between them shimmered with leftover electricity.

I pitied him then. The poor fool didn’t understand. He couldn’t feel what I felt. Couldn’t sense the magnitude behind that naked man’s mind and the raw wrongness of it.

Even I, the Witch, who had seen minds unravel and realities bleed into one another, had no idea who or what he truly was. But I knew enough.

He was not your average cape.

The brute lunged, too fast for the untrained eye to follow. His fist collided with the man’s chest, and for a heartbeat, I thought he’d actually landed the hit. Then light erupted from the point of impact.

The brute staggered back, his expression frozen somewhere between confusion and agony. His muscles convulsed, skin turning black and cracking. Thin streams of smoke curled from his mouth and nostrils. The stench of cooked flesh filled the cabin.

The naked man tilted his head, watching the hulk collapse like a marionette with its strings cut. A faint smile tugged at his lips.

“You mistake thunder for a man,” he said softly, almost kindly. “And that mistake just killed you.”

The brute hit the floor with a dull thud, smoke leaking from his chest cavity, fried from the inside out, despite his supposed invulnerability, I’ve heard about. The lightning lingered in the air, humming, sentient and alive, as if waiting for its next victim.

“This is what’s going to happen,” the man said, his voice calm but thrumming with the weight of thunder. The lightning still danced faintly along his skin, curling from fingertip to elbow in soft, electric veins. “From now on, you work for me.”

His eyes were pale and sharp, almost crystalline. They shifted to me. “Witch,” he said. “Please, take care of the pilot.”

I hesitated only for a second. Then I did as I was told.

It wasn’t obedience born of fear; it was recognition. Something primal deep inside me told me this was no being I could afford to challenge. My telepathy might have reached into the minds of kings and killers, but his will burned too brightly to grasp. Even from this distance, his thoughts flared like a storm against the surface of my consciousness, and my mind flinched from it instinctively.

The pilot, poor, terrified, and mundane, sat frozen at the controls, hands shaking. He wasn’t a soldier or a cape, just a man trying to make it to the end of the day. I reached into him, slipping past his resistance with the ease of a knife through silk.

“Forgive me.”

His consciousness folded beneath mine. The body slumped for a moment, then straightened. My awareness spread, stretching across the synapses of his brain. I bid the soul within farewell and welcome the new vessel now added to my collective.

That was how my power worked… Telepathy-12, as they classified it. I couldn’t duplicate myself in the minds of other capes; their altered neural frequencies resisted intrusion. But with mundanes… oh, I could bloom. Each mind became an extension of my will, an expansion of my reach. My telepathic web grew stronger with every vessel, until distance meant nothing.

When I opened my new eyes, the pilot’s eyes, the world shimmered in dual focus. I could see through both bodies at once: my old, frail frame, and this new, healthy one gripping the controls. The sensation was nauseating, exhilarating, and familiar.

The lightning man watched me with faint amusement, the corners of his mouth twitching as though he could read what I was doing without needing to ask.

“Good,” he murmured, then turned to the others.

Silence followed. Even the toughest among us, from the pyromancer with molten eyes and the psychic bruiser who once fought tanks barehanded, stood still, unwilling to speak. The corpse of the Invincible-8 still smoked near the hatch, his flesh curling in on itself like burnt parchment. That was proof enough of the man’s might.

The man’s presence was suffocating. His mind radiated, not in emotion, not in thought, but in force. A consciousness that had weight. I’d brushed against god-complexes before, but this was something else.

He smiled, and the air itself seemed to pulse with residual electricity.

“Now,” he said, voice smooth and almost kind, “how about a proper introduction from me, truly?”

No one spoke. No one dared.

I could feel the surface thoughts of those around me, evolving from fear, awe, disbelief, and sheer bewilderment. The man stepped forward, his bare feet leaving faint scorch marks on the metal floor. He spread his arms slightly, the light flickering brighter along his veins.

“I am the convergence of what should not have been,” he said softly, “and what will be. The breach made flesh. The promise made lightning.”

He smiled wider now, light crackling at the corners of his mouth, illuminating the dark interior of the cargo hold.

“You may call me…” He paused, letting the static hum between syllables, “…the Messiah, the Light.”