Chapter 18: A flicker of Madnes

The battle was chaos. The sun was beginning to set, and it was getting more and more difficult seeing who was fighting whom. Alex tried to made his way to the Leader, only to be blocked by an enemy Giftless. Alex wrapped his wires around him and threw him to the side before he had a chance to do anything significant. He suddenly lost sight of Andre due to the crowd.

"Jack!" he shouted, with the intention of asking him to raise the ground below him, but his voice was lost in the chaos. Another man rushed in from his right, holding a metal pipe aloft. 

Perfect.

Alex stopped both his arms with his wires, jumped on top of his shoulders and positioned his gun's barrel under his chin. Alex pulled the trigger as he jumped even higher, the sound of metal tearing through flesh and bone ringing out behind him. His eyes found Andre in those few seconds in which he was airborne. Andre was carefully walking circles around the Leader. Andre's eyes met Alex's, and their was a silent message in them. 

I might need a little help here, is what the eyes said to Alex.

He landed, trapping a few more Giftless in his wires, and pinning them to the ground. Some of his field of vision was cleared. James appeared behind him with a gun of his own and stood back to back with Alex. 

"I suggest you spare some of the Giftless." he said, catching his breath.

"I was considering the same." Alex replied. Killing all the Giftless would mean a lot of deaths.

James rushed into a group of people and, instead of shooting them, knocked them out swiftly with a sharp blow to their heads with his gun.

Alex rushed towards Andre, throwing people aside with his wires. 

Andre was still circling around the enemy leader, cautious after getting his hand broken. Seeing Alex, the old man increased the rumbling of the ground even more, to the point that even his own men were having trouble standing. 

Alex pointed his gun at him. As he had expected, the kid next to the Leader stepped out to stop the shot. Alex shot, and melted backwards into the crowd to reload. Andre had taken the opportuning to back off. 

Some men from both side had fallen in the melee, but no one appeared to have died. 

Alex lashed out with his wires, his eyes shining as red as the blood moon that had started making its presence known in the sky. He managed to grab twelve people by the neck, aiming to choke them and make them faint. But in that moment, with twelve lives in his hands, he felt something inside him call for blood. Normally he would have suppressed the thought, thrown it away into the back of his mind. But there, in the heat of the moment, with his mind working on impulse, he couldn't even try. Without even being conscious of the act, he closed his fist as the wires dug into their necks. 

Their was blood. Enough of it to paint a house red. Alex felt some of it splatter onto his face. He let his wires drop. The battle ceased around him. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a man drop down, cover his head with both his hands and whimper in fear. And he wondered how he looked. Standing in the middle of twelve corpses with the sky doing dark around him, eyes shining crimson and face splattered with blood. Even his own men looked afraid. 

The demon of the 13th division. A voice in his head said loudly. Remember why they called you that?

"DEMON SPAWN!" the Leader shouted. 

Alex turned his head to look at him. 

Why did you kill those men, Alex? A new voice in his head -quieter- asked. 

Why? Because he could! Another new voice- louder than the first-replied.

The Leader raised his walking stick. The rumbling ceased.

"Alex!" heard Alex, but dismissed it as another voice.

"Alex!"

No. This wasn't a voice.

Rose.

Alex looked at her. His Rose. She had made the voices in his head disappear once, when they were younger. Could she do it again? With a new version of him, who had built so many walls around his heart that even he himself could no longer enter?

"Snap out of it!" Rose said, and then pulled him down just in time to dodge a large rock thrown directly at him. 

Alex gathered himself-tried to gather himself. 

"Sorry." he said, and without waiting for a response, shifted his focus onto whoever threw the rock.

It was a rather scrawny guy, someone he had read about in the list of Gifted he had received from his contacts. 

"You, Sir," the man said, with a great fury in his eyes, the likes of which Alex had seldom seen before. "Are a dead man."

The man raised his hand, and a large rock -almost four feet wide- materialised out of thin air. He pulled his arm back and threw it as if he was throwing a pebble. 

Before Alex could move, Andre jumped in front of him, seemingly out of nowhere, and grabbed the rock mid-air with his unbroken hand. 

Volkov appeared behind him. "I don't know what happened, but you need to get yourself together."

"Rose," Alex whispered, ignoring everyone, not even caring how scared he sounded. 

"I'm here."

"They're back."

"Who are back?"

"They're back." Alex looked at his hands. They were shaking. He'd almost forgotten the torment. The constant chattering, the demands, the mockery. Now that they were back, he realized something about himself. There was nothing he feared more than his own mind.

"Alex!"

"They're back." he whispered absent mindedly again.

Rose slapped Alex across the face. "Listen here you idiot!" She shouted as she grabbed him by the collar. "You are Alexander f***ing King, and you are going to pull yourself together. Talk to me!"

More people had arrived on the scene behind her, protecting the two from the wrath of the Londeners. Alex saw Jack cast a worried glance, and go back to putting up earthen walls with his Power.

"The voices," Alex said, looking Rose in the eye, trying to calm himself. "I heard them again."

Rose's eyes flickered, and she was silent for a moment, but her face remained resolute. "Can you hear them now?"

"No."

"Then we can worry later. We'll work on it together. You and I. As always. But right now, Alex, I need you. All of us need you. Get up." 

Alex nodded. He stood up, closed his eyes, trying to calm himself yet again, and this time it worked. He looked around, taking in the chaos, choosing his next move.

He turned around sharply on instinct, only face a shocked enemy who thought he could sneak up on him. Alex swung out, landing a punch on the jaw, and knocking the man out cold.

Something caught his attention. A car had stopped in front of the Outer Gate. No registration plate, all windows tinted black. Relying on pure instinct, Alex motioned to Volkov and Rose that he was heading out, and jogged towards the gate. 

Before Alex reached the gates, the doors of the car opened, three people emerging simultaneously. The sun had gone down, and it was difficult to see their faces, but Alex could tell who one of them was through his silhouette, due to the sheer amount of time he had spent examining him, trying to get as much info out of the pictures as possible.

Of course you had to show up. 

The Chopper. A man who had almost been turned into a myth. But that was bound to happen. After all, no one ever sees him coming. As he slices up powerful Gifted and wrecks havoc in guilds, no one sees him. The photos Alex managed to get his hands on all showed him as a blur, and they were still remarkably hard to find. The only major sources of info about him were rumours, and the only evidence of him having been somewhere were the chopped up bodies he left in his wake. 

His reputation almost matches mine from back then. Alex had thought when he had first heard of him. And now, here he was, the man himself.

The man called The Chopper moved his head, and Alex had a maddening thought that through the darkness, their eyes met for a second.

Alex moved towards him, simultaneously signaling behind him for support, and the man , unexpectedly, unsheathed a sword from a scabbard at his hip. 

Alex couldn't see it clearly, but the weapon gleamed under the light of the moon.

Some guy -from the 3rd division by the looks of it- rushed towards the newcomers. The other two, ignoring both the oncoming threat and Alex, headed out in opposite directions. Alex would have given chase, but taking his eyes of The Chopper seemed too risky. 

The moment The Chopper was in range, the guy from the 3rd Division swung out with the dagger, aiming straight for the throat. 

How fine the line between stupidity and bravery is! A voice whispered.

What happened next made Alex feel that he had finally gone mad, after all the years of death and violence. 

One moment, The Chopper was in front of the his attacker, the dagger inches from his neck. The next moment, he was behind him, his stance not changed a bit. Before Alex could decide if he was indeed insane, The Chopper spun around and struck the man on the neck with his sword. The hit was fueled with just the strength from his right arm, but it chopped the other man's head clean off.

Alex moved on instinct again, pulling out a knife from somewhere he didn't even know he kept it and raising his gun. 

His blade reached The Chopper first, but by then he had turned around. He swung his blade. 

Alex's wires intercepted its path with the aim to slow it down, but surprisingly they stopped it. 

This is too risky. And it was true. He was acting on instinct much more than usual. He had headed in after seeing the ability just once.

Then, just as Alex's weapon was about to make contact, The Chopper vanished.

Yet again, Alex followed his instinct and turned around. The Chopper was there, in the same crouching position as he was before disappearing. 

He swung upwards with the sword, but Alex foresaw it and sidestepped right to dodge. The weapon whooshed past his face, and he heard the sound of steel being cut to his left, but he didn't risk a glance.

Using the momentum, Alex smashed his right fist into The Chopper's jaw. He staggered, but pulled his blade back for a counter attack. Alex saw the weapon clearly this time. It was slightly curved, with a medium-length handle, and the blade itself boasting a beautiful Damascus pattern. Alex was almost impressed with the elegance of the sword.

The Chopper disappeared again. Alex swung backwards immediately, but he wasn't there.

Where? 

Again, on instinct, he looked up, only to sidestep to get out of the path of the weapon. The blade grazed his forearm, and impossibly, sliced the ground without even touching it. 

What kind of ability is this....

Then, something clicked. 

Ignoring the enemy who had just landed in front of him, he snapped his head towards the car. It was sliced cleanly in half. 

The blade had never touched the car. 

He was seeing some sort of pattern now. Vanishing and reappearing - teleportation of some sort- followed by an attack, which doesn't necessarily need to hit to slice something. 

The Chopper vanished yet again, appearing to Alex's left this time. This time, the sword was headed for his neck. Alex ducked, and swung out with the knife in his left hand without wasting a breath. The Chopper dodged, pulling his sword toward himself to counter, but Alex was faster. 

The knife was a distraction. His wires moved swiftly enveloping The Chopper, trying to slice whatever they could touch. Alex felt them dig into his opponents left hand first. He felt them draw blood. And then, just as he had expected, The Chopper disappeared.

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