Chapter 7D: A Common Man's Cloak

I steadied my nerves and sprinted diagonally past the daggerman. He flinched with surprise, unsure why I would do this, but then I executed a swift swerve and threw my foot upon a pillar. By pushing off of it, I catapulted myself straight at my enemy and slashed my shimmering sword. Aeliana yelped in the background as an admonition to a truth I had already expected. I tore down my enemy before he could even swerve to face me, but my blade had only destroyed his decoy. He tried to strike from beneath the cascade of his dismembered dummy, but it was in that moment that I brought my sword crashing down with all my strength. In a scarlet splash of blood and bone, I broke his body and severed his right arm in the moment he tried to strike; his right dagger flew into the rafters with a resonant clamor. He shouted with pain and tried to stand, but then I plunged my sword again through his left forearm and pinned him to the dusty ground. Aeliana watched with wide eyes, but I stood over my crumbling enemy with a gratified glare. Blood and ink poured through his jacket and stained the ground beneath his body.

“You died in the moment you dared to hurt Aeliana. There was never any outcome other than this; the wave function could never collapse in any other way. Even the stars and the city are set to stand against us, but I will eliminate anything that keeps us apart. I knew I would kill you because I am an optimist – I foresee a favorable future and disregard any alternative. But in truth I am also a realist; I know that the world will not conform to my dream unless I force it to conform in a shower of blood and black fire. Your only solace now is that you’ve become a steppingstone to our immortal love. You are an ingredient for our unholy ascension,” I said to my enemy as a lurid exposition.

I dropped to my knees in that moment and bathed my hands in the blood and ink. I could tell with one glance that this ink was not the same as what I used to scribble ordinary equations into a notebook filled with nonsense. This ink was the same vague color as that with which those in the underworld inscribed each Array of Black Fire. I glanced at his bloodstained dagger to show the shape of the Array, and then I began to rewrite it myself on his dying body.

The defeated daggerman glared at me and said, “The knowledge that you killed me will live forever in your head. Just in trying to stop a killer, you became a killer yourself. Now you’re no better than me.”

I simply showed a sinister smile and spoke, “I am a monster hiding in a common man’s cloak. I care only about Aeliana and myself; I could happily eradicate everybody else. I have no interest to call myself the better man. I never cared for justice even before all this began.”

It was then that I completed the Array of Black Fire. As soon as I closed the final bend in the inscription, it activated and illuminated with a golden glow. Black fire burned the bloodstained body of the man who strived to steal Aeliana, but his skin did not succumb to the forces of fire. Instead, his soul burned as a catalyst that then surged into my being. In a chaotic convergence which traversed the mind and soul, I could feel my victim seep into my head while his stolen fuel empowered my spirit. But before he could even scratch the surface of my mind from the inside, I could feel Aziel suppressing him. It was now that I realized that this confirmed something I had only suspected in the past; my mind was a cauldron cursed to carry the molten ghosts of everyone I killed.

As a warm welcome to the nameless daggerman I had locked inside my head, I ripped my sword from his corpse’s arm and then crushed his shoulder with a stomp. With all the strength in my arms, I sent my sword slashing through his back in a full-force crash. Blood and bone blasted from his body like an ocean wave, and then I brought my foot down on his head. I slammed his face into the ground with all my strength, again and again, shouting to the world a vile warning to anyone else who dared to stand between us. Even as my own shouts echoed off the empty walls of this abandoned building, I continued to stomp until his broken teeth blew out of his mouth. I sustained this onslaught as his jaw collapsed and his eyes erupted in a bloody splash; I stomped until his skull shattered into splinters. But with the same stomp that blew through his brain, the shockwaves pulsed through the shaky structure and shifted the rafters above me. I could hear the crash of metal, and then Aeliana exclaimed through the rope which bound her mouth.

In the moment that my enemy’s dagger fell from the rafters above, I desperately protected myself in the only way I could; I activated a technique that I had not yet realized I possessed. Right before I would have been struck, I summoned a decoy to take the hit for me, just as the daggerman had done all throughout our fight. The blade pierced partway through the dummy, but I had survived the strike without a scratch. I was shocked that I had inherited my victim’s power, but even more than that, I found myself fascinated that I saved myself with this weapon so suddenly. There was no question about it; Aziel had saved my life from the inside by wielding the weapon we witnessed together.

When I threw the decoy aside, I saw Aeliana still bound to the wall at the edge of the shadows, watching me with tears which shimmered in her eyes. I could sense her bittersweet sadness even from a distance, so I rushed over to her and tore the restraints which locked her in place.

“I thought you wanted nothing to do with me,” she said in the moment she finally fell free. She stared at me with tears in her eyes, but I wiped the blood from my skin and then wrapped my arms around her.

“I have reason to believe that you and she share the same soul. Perhaps you became her when you killed her, or perhaps you simply devoured your own past life. We have no way to know for sure. But all I know in this moment is that we are meant for each other; we are destined for each other as twin flames dancing in an endless spiral, like two black holes caught in the other’s infinite orbit. We are scattered in space but together in time, constantly crossing paths like the double helix in the code that conscripts us for the other.”