Chapter 122 Total Villainy

I remained seated on my bike, Bunny, the hum of his dormant engine whispering through the ground. The air shimmered with residual energy from the supply truck’s exhaust, the same truck I’d been ordered to escort here. It idled behind me, heavy with fuel and secrets.

Thirdhand stood a few meters back, just behind Light, whose eyes burned holes through the air between us. His glare was pure venom, restrained by nothing but his own self-control and maybe the faint curiosity of what I’d do next.

Thirdhand’s tone cracked the silence. “Can someone please explain to me what’s happening here?”

Light didn’t hesitate. “He’s betraying us.”

A muscle twitched across Thirdhand’s jaw. “First, Assessor betrays us, and now you?” His voice trembled, not with fear, but disbelief. “I thought highly of you, Eclipse... But what is this?”

I rested my gloved hands on Bunny’s handles, letting the wind brush against my porcelain mask. “I don’t bother with small fry,” I said evenly, “so I’ll get straight to the point.”

Thirdhand’s face twitched, his hand-head flexed, its fingers pulsing like separate minds in agitation. “Small fry?!” he snapped, his voice overlapping in a grotesque harmony with some kind of psychic presence.

I felt his telekinesis coil around me, a pressure like invisible serpents wrapping tighter with every heartbeat. Dust lifted from the ground. My limbs trembled under the psychic strain. But Bunny whined softly beneath me, responding to the aggression on its own. A null barrier surged outward, a shimmering dome of violet static that swallowed everything within a two-meter radius.

The telekinetic pressure dispersed instantly.

Thirdhand stumbled back, half of his finger-mouths shrieking in frustration. “What the fuck was that?!”

I tilted my head slightly toward Light, who hadn’t moved. His expression was unreadable, too calm and certain. There was something terrible brewing behind those eyes.

“Here’s the thing—” I began, but my words were ripped apart by motion.

Light vanished from where he stood.

A streak of luminescence, faster than I could process, tore through the null barrier as if it were mist. My reflexes screamed, Empathy and Enhancer ratings flared to maximum, but it didn’t matter. He was already there.

Then came the pain.

It wasn’t just a blow; it was obliteration. He ripped through me, through my phase field, through my intangibility, and through me. Bunny’s metal shrieked beside me, torn apart like wet paper. I felt my ribs shattered, my lungs collapsed, and my vision collapsed into white.

And then, he was holding my heart. It pulsed once in his fist. I remember staring at it, red and trembling, and thinking… so that’s the color of my heart. Funny. I’d seen so many before. Never expected it to look so human.

Darkness consumed me.

But not for so long.

I gasped. The same air. The same spot. The same wind.

Bunny hummed beneath me, intact. The supply truck still idled. Thirdhand stood behind Light. Everything was as it had been a few seconds ago.

Light was in front of me again, but this time, his expression had changed. The calm was gone, replaced by raw, crackling fury.

His voice cut through the still air. “What did you do?”

“The moment I died, you probably saw Missive’s dead body drop from a wormhole. By the way, that was her idea. If you so much as touched me again, she died, and the loop spun; it rewound and spun until the film shredded… unless you agreed to a game.

The SRC had grossly misread Missive. They called her a precog; I called her a time-loop architect with a guest pass. Her precognition wasn't a glance at a single future. Instead, it was a recursive protocol, a loop with a “plus one” extension. That plus one was probably because Mother lived inside her: an old god-in-code, a nested persona that amplified Missive’s foresight and let her pull one extra soul back with her like a tail of light.

Light's jaw was a hard plane of calm until he said, “Fine. Let’s play.”

I folded my hands on Bunny's grips and laid out the rules like cards on a table where everyone had a loaded pistol. “Rule no. 1: you can’t kill me.”

Thirdhand snorted, fingers-voices spitting in disgust. “Hah. We’ll see that, fucker.” He lunged, a flurry of intent, but Light's palm rose with a single, flat command, and Thirdhand froze mid-gesture, like a puppet whose strings had been cut and tangled.

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Light hissed. His voice was tight as wire.

I looked at him. I let the memory of my chest in his hand flare behind my eyes like a film burned over, the warmth, the ridiculous ordinary red. It made my mouth dry. “You saw what just happened, didn’t you?” I asked. I answered myself. “You killed me. You took my heart, and for a neat second, you made the fact that I bled like everyone else.”

There was a hiss from my earpiece. It was Guesswork. “Taunt him. His tap into Missive might be bandwidth-limited. Push him to use it; make him waste futures, if you could.”

“I’m aware you can tap into Missive’s loops and see what she sees,” I said out loud to Light, letting the words drown into the cracked sky. “I wonder how many tries you have before the feed drops. I have a feeling it’s finite. This entire ‘game’ is a theatre Missive built after being ground by your tyranny… a mockery, really. And frankly, I’m enjoying watching the star of the show fidget.”

“What the hell is going on, Ning?” demanded Thirdhand.

“Shut up,” Light snapped. “I’m thinking.”

The supply truck behind me coughed and opened like a mouth. The cargo bays’ backs folded out, and SRC special forces leaped down in a practiced cascade. Black armor. Glassy visors. Rifles like serrated promises. I lifted a fist to stop them; they formed a tight line behind me with the precision of training and the willingness of cannon fodder.

“Rule no. 2,” I continued, voice low and brittle, “you will leave this place and go look for Missive. Because only by finding her can you stop her from sharing that looped sight with me. Every time you kill me, the scenario rewinds to this exact moment. We talk. You kill me again. We talk. And again. I can shut down my body whenever I please; torturing it is like stomping on a broken puppet. So I suggest, you don’t try something like that… or maybe, you already did…”

Light’s teeth ground. He could have stopped me with a thought, snapped my spine, and ended the negotiation on a single, arrogant note. Instead, he listened, and that made me notice the micro-shifts in his face, the way impatience carved new lines.

“You don’t know that,” Light offered finally, venom thin on the words. “Say, your loved ones—”

“I don’t have any loved ones.”

At my words, Light bristled.

“Rule no. 3,” I said, and let my voice drag over the name like a blade, “me and my boys here will go through every floor of the Tenfold Keep and kill everyone in it. While you chase Missive, we run the gauntlet. We finish the rest of the ‘six’ who aren’t getting out. Poor architecture, by the way… a singular entrance with nowhere to run. Oh, this is gonna be fun…”

“Nick,” called Light in a familiar manner, and then he grinned so much that it split his face with a manic edge. He said, deliberate and slow: “Nicole O. Silvers. You loved her, didn’t you? I know her. I know who makes you bleed behind everything. I can make her watch. I can make her suffer. I can make—”

I squeaked out a laugh that sounded like a broken spring. “Pffft…”

Light’s head snapped toward me. “Did you just laugh?”

I let it bloom. It burst out of me. It was raw, incredulous, and filthy. “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha~! That’s the best you got!? Are you a fucking idiot!? That doesn’t achieve anything besides pissing me off. What about Missive? She’s the one who dies in the end, and your grand goals turn to dust. I can’t believe a self-declared messiah like you would be this stupid, especially for your age! Fuck… your incompetence is almost inspiring. If you think we’re going to play hostage-exchange to negotiate, go ahead and try. Do you even know where Nicole lives? I’m curious where you pinched that info, the future maybe, but it makes me hopeful, maybe she gets powers later, maybe we end up together, or maybe she becomes a god for all I care. You’re making me crack up.”

Guesswork’s voice was a dry thumb against my eardrum: “Enough with the mocking. He’s at his limit; provoke him enough and he might just give no more fucks and kill you for real.”

I let the earpiece click and smiled under my porcelain mask, wiping a tear away with the back of my gloved hand as if I’d been laughing too hard. “What is it gonna be, Light?”

He looked like a god trying not to kill a fly. “I don’t care anymore. If she wants to die, then let her. I can’t believe you would fall so low, Nick. The SRC? Really? Do you think that makes you a hero?”

Man, the way he talked to me, being familiar was rubbing me the wrong way.

Time to dangle the carrot.

“That’s where you’re wrong, Light. I’m not trying to be a hero.” I let the words drip. “I’m a total villain. See, I planted a little breadcrumb with my friends here.” I nodded to the SRC special forces arrayed behind me. “One of them has a clue. A piece of paper, really. Enough to narrow down where to look for Missive.”

Light’s eyes sharpened like knives. He looked to the air beside him and asked, “Is he saying the truth?”

Paleman stepped out of nowhere: pale skin, empty-eyed, an empathy that smelled faintly of rain.  He answered with bored certainty. “Yes.”

I watched the SRC soldiers shift. They seemed anxious. Of course, they would. They were uninformed, after all. Guesswork insisted on it, so that’s what we did. Underneath it all, John had agreed. Personally, I didn’t think too much about it. They were pawns, knowingly moved. Most of them believed they were on the right side of the chessboard, which made the play cleaner.

“What are you doing now?” I asked my co-workers. “Run.”

They took their chances.

The first gunshots cracked like snapped nerves. Nullifier rounds, designed to slam through phasing and damp fields, cut the air. The sound was a chord I’d heard a thousand times: mechanical, righteous, hopeful. Bullets streamed toward Light in a disciplined fan.

They passed through him like wind through glass.

I felt my teeth grind. The rounds did nothing. They shimmered at the point of contact and continued on their preordained trajectory, embedding in the concrete pillar behind him or clanging harmlessly into Bunny’s ruined chrome. Light didn’t even flinch. He only smiled. The SRC men kept firing until the magazine clicks sounded like funeral bells.

Paleman gave a stutter of motion and then vanished, like dust. I didn’t see the mechanics. One second, he wore the pale, honest face; the next, he was gone, and the space he’d occupied hummed with a silent question. Huh? So he didn’t want to play.

Thirdhand ran for the building.

Light vanished in a streak of white-blue, the air snapping open with ozone and thunder. One of the SRC soldiers barely had time to scream before his body lit up like a filament. He convulsed mid-step, armor warping, the flesh underneath cooking through layers of synthetic weave until he collapsed as a heap of carbonized ruin. The smell of burnt polymer and bone lingered, sticky and intimate.

I stayed on Bunny’s seat, one hand on the handle, the other resting near my sidearm more for show than intent. Around me, over a hundred SRC paramilitary soldiers fanned out in the open expanse, a wall of rifles, null-resistant armor, and corporate insignia that meant less than the dirt they stood on. They were professional, efficient, and disposable.

Guesswork’s voice had been right so far. The plan was holding. Light couldn’t afford to tangle with me, not directly, not while Missive’s loop tethered us like ghosts in each other’s throats. That made me a complication, not a target. He’d kill me last. That thought gave me breathing room, if you could call breathing in a storm of blood “room.”

“Form up!” someone shouted, a squad leader maybe, one of the better trained ones.

Light appeared again in their formation like a glitch. Two more men disintegrated under the weight of his power, armor plates liquefying, flesh atomized. The others broke ranks, panic bleeding through discipline. The field turned to chaos, gunfire snapping in every direction.

Lightning streaked across the battlefield, each bolt precise and deadly. Light didn’t rush; he enjoyed the slaughter. Every kill was followed by a pause, a body checked, and a hand rifling through pockets. He was searching for the ‘breadcrumb’ I’d promised him.

Guesswork had said he’d take the bait. He’d been right.

Light was methodical with tearing open vests, crushing helmets, and snapping necks with idle disinterest. When one of the nullifier grenades detonated near him, the energy rippled across his body like a mild inconvenience, static dispersing in harmless sparks. His retaliation was instantaneous, a flash that melted five men into slag.

The SRC soldiers tried to retreat, firing suppression rounds, their tactics collapsing into survival instinct. They were enhanced, sure… nerve reflex augmentations, kinetic dampers, some laced with null-metals to resist cape effects. But Light wasn’t “cape” in the conventional sense. He was lightning wrapped in arrogance.

A few of the men managed to drag wounded comrades behind the overturned truck, trying to regroup. Others just ran, their boots splashing through puddles of oil and blood. I watched them scatter to tiny dots in the dust in my Empathy, their desire for survival burning brightly for all to see.

It was working. They were doing their job of buying time, dying loudly, and distracting Light. That’s what they were picked for.

“Fodder.”

I told myself it wasn’t personal, that the SRC had chosen them from the pool of mundanes for a reason. They knew what they were signing up for: hazard pay for a death without a name. Still, as their comms filled with screams and static, I couldn’t shake the bitterness that rose in my throat.

“It’s a sad world we live in,” I thought. Heck, my mom could’ve been among them.

Lightning arced again. The thunder rolled across the Keep, shattering glass and setting alarms wailing. Light stood amid the corpses, framed by the smoldering remains of a man whose armor had fused into his ribcage. He looked up, eyes burning through the haze, hunting for me.

I met his gaze through my mask and revved Bunny’s engine, letting its vibration drown out the sound of dying.

My earpiece buzzed, Missive’s voice cutting through the static, “Proceed, Eclipse,” she said. “And make it quick.”