The Real World (Six - Mind Games)

Ethan Kai came awake with the panic of a drowning man breaching the surface. His body seized, lungs locked in protest, vision smeared with black edges. His eyes snapped open—not to a mountain or a scope, but to the steel door of the cell and the crushing pressure at his throat.

There were hands. Real hands. Gripping. Squeezing. Two fists like vices clamped around his neck, hauling him half off the bunk. His foot caught in the steel bedframe, his body arched backward, helpless to the force dragging him down.

Tom.

His cellmate loomed above him, face contorted. Eyes wild. Not glowing now, not aflame. Just wide with panic and strain, blood vessels bulging, mouth working around ragged syllables. "Can't stop. Can't stop. Something in my head. It hurts. Make it stop hurting. Kill him and it will stop hurting. Can't stop!"

Ethan thrashed, trained reflexes kicking in. His hands clawed at Tom's wrists, trying to peel them back, but the grip was absolute. Already, black dots swam at the edges of his vision. His lungs screamed. He was suffocating, breaking, not in a dream, but here. Now.

Think. Move. Foot's caught. Get free. He twisted, leg trapped at the ankle. Left. Down. Pull. Muscles trembled with effort. The angle was wrong. Pain flared in his hip. But then—resistance gave. His ankle popped free. He dropped like a sack of meat, slamming into the concrete. The impact jolted Tom's grip just enough. Ethan, barely clinging to consciousness, drove a heel up, caught the man square in the chin.

Tom staggered backward, almost to the floor, clutching his head. "It's in me," he moaned. "Its eyes burn. It's burning me."

Ethan rolled clear, gasping, his chest hitching as breath surged in. He shoved himself upright, legs shaky but responsive, and pressed his back to the cold wall. Every nerve burned, hyperaware. His eyes locked on Tom, who crouched on the floor, rocking hard enough to shake the frame.

The man's whole body spasmed with raw energy. Fingers dug into his temples, nails scoring bloody crescents into his scalp. He muttered in broken, rapid fragments—words that collided, overlapped, and dissolved.

Then stillness. Too sudden. Too complete.

Tom's spine straightened with unnatural stiffness. His arms dropped to his sides. His head jerked upward like a puppet on invisible strings. The eyes were wrong. Not crazed now. Focused. Measured.

And in that frozen calm, Ethan recognized him. Not Tom. The Betrayer.

The thing in Tom smiled, lips cracking with tension. His voice, when it came, was velvet around steel.

"Nicely done. Not many can wake themselves from a dream I have controlled. But now I ask again. Where are we? You will tell me, of course."

The sound that scraped from his cellmate's throat was metal on bone. Not human. A spike of pure terror mixed with sudden exhilaration hammered through Ethan's chest. No. The word was a silent scream in his mind. It was just a dream.

His palms, suddenly slick, slid against the concrete behind him. He tried to draw a breath and failed, his lungs seizing in a series of ragged, useless gasps. In the dream, he could write it off. A nightmare, nothing more. Sure, it had felt real in the moment, but he had woken himself, heart pounding, and the real world was his haven from this madness, this Shadow. But that Shadow had followed him. Not from a magic doorway, but from a dream…. a dream? It was all real now. The primary villain of the Wheel of Time had crossed over.

He risked a glance at the man opposite him. The eyes that stared back were not Tom's, weary or resigned. They gleamed with an intelligence cruel and precise and utterly alien. Ethan tried to press himself into the wall, to make himself pass through it. His tongue was a dry knot in his mouth.

Primal instinct, every cell, screamed at him to run, but it warred with a horrible growing excitement. This was really happening. Everything he had ever fantasized about when reading a good book. All of it crashing down into him in this one day made for a cold certainty that settled in his gut. It was heavy and absolute: own the situation or die.

"This has been a day for revelations, I believe. My fated enemy is gone for a time, but you might make for an interesting diversion before the Wheel spins Lews back into the Pattern." the thing said, rising up from the floor, stepping up in a fluid, but bent motion. "You, who bore witness to my victory."

It took a step forward, hands twitching as though feeling for something long-lost. "You struck at me in the World of Dreams. You have left marks. That is not… possible. I have to know more." The smile twitched at the corners, strained now with something that might have been confusion—or unease. "You reek of contradiction. Your thread is not in the weave. And yet... you touched me."

Tom's body flexed, posture shifting. The skin at his jaw pulsed with heat. "Let us discover how you did that, shall we?" Another step. Then, voice lowering, tightening with a subtle edge of fury: "This time, little worm, you will not leave. Not whole." A sudden jolt ran through Tom's frame, and he lunged. No warning. No prelude. Just motion—fast, violent, direct.

Ethan moved without thought, rusty muscle memory taking over. The moment Tom surged forward, Ethan sidestepped, dropping his center of gravity low. He let the momentum pass, let Tom's bulk brush his shoulder as he spun in tight behind.

Tom—no, the Betrayer who wore Tom—pivoted too fast for a man his size. Military fast. Combat-trained fast. A foot swept low, trying to take Ethan's legs out from under him. Ethan jumped it, just barely, and brought an elbow down toward the base of Tom's neck. Blocked. The man's arm snapped up and caught it mid-strike. The grip was iron. Tom—possessed or not—should not have been this strong. Ethan knew this based on their earlier encounter. The man did not have that kind of timing, except now he did.

The bastard stepped in close, drove a shoulder into Ethan's ribs. The cell wall slammed into Ethan's back a heartbeat later. A fist came next—raw and direct. Ethan ducked, turned with it, and redirected the blow into the concrete. Knuckles cracked on impact. The thing grunted with surprise, but did not scream.

Ethan twisted under the arm and landed two body shots. One to the kidney. One to the floating rib. A civilian would have dropped. Tom only gasped, but just barely flinched. His face contorted—there was pain there, but also satisfaction.

"I know war," the Betrayer hissed through clenched teeth. "You give me clues to what you are. You… fight like no man of my world. But you are out of practice." In answer to that taunt Ethan grabbed the collar of Tom's shirt, yanked down, and slammed his knee up hard. Tom grunted. Teeth snapped together. The Betrayer's headbutt came a split second later. Ethan staggered back under the blow.

Ethan spat blood and grinned, eyes narrowing as he reset his stance. His body was waking up. He had not lost it. The edge had been dulled by his time out, but it was still there. "Not so easy when you don't have your powers here, eh shitstick?"

For a moment, Tom's body froze. The smile that came was more human than it had been before, but it still stretched too wide. It was a little annoyed, it seemed. A mask carved from something old and brittle.

"You mistake absence for weakness, warrior." Elan Morin's voice emerged slow, deliberate, like words being remembered rather than spoken. He stepped forward, hands curling again into fists. "This body is clumsy. Mortal. Even before I swore to the Great Lord of the Dark I had lived several of your lifetimes. I have ten thousand forms of death, With the One Power, with the True Power, with blade, and with my bare hands. I trained the generals that have remade the shape of the world. I have slain my enemies like a farmer reaps the fields."

Another step. His face was close now. Not snarling…curious.

"But you… You've killed, too. Real killing. Not the casual kind that fools speak of. But the bloody kind, the kind that leaves stains no water can wash away." The grin faded into something sharper. Leaner.

"I smell it on you. Guilt. Rage. Discipline rotting on the vine."

A short, bitter laugh followed. "We may not be so different."

The punch came fast. No wind-up, no bluff—just knuckles aimed for his throat. But Ethan had seen better. The terror from moments ago had scoured him clean, leaving a strange calm in its place. He was awake now. In that sliver of time, the world narrowed to the fist, the arm, the shifting weight of his attacker. His body moved on its own, a decade of training taking over. All those years afterwards, pushing paper, biting his tongue while weak men in suits got ahead—that was the dream. This was real. Here, with violence clear and honest, things finally made sense again.

He pivoted with the strike, trapping the wrist mid-thrust with his left hand while his right snapped over the elbow, locking the joint. He stepped inside, twisted, and used the momentum to drive the possessed body backward. Tom's mass hit the bunk frame hard, the steel groaning under the sudden weight. Ethan followed through, dragging the arm up behind the man's back and planting a knee between his shoulders. A perfect control hold. Ugly. Brutal. Effective.

Tom's body thrashed once—then stilled. Controlled. Just enough. Ethan leaned in, voice low and venomous. "Ten thousand forms of death? I'm already bored, fucker." The body twitched, like a chord struck wrong.

"Besides," Ethan continued, "weren't you a philosopher or something? Weren't you the first to turn to your so-called Great Lord? Like a fucking coward—once you figured out that your little reborn-again-and-again theory meant that you'd never find your end or release or whatever…" Silence. Then a slow inhale. Not Tom's breath, but the drawn in surprise from something else.

"You," the Betrayer rasped, "should not know that." Not anger. Not fear. Disbelief. A tremor ran through the man's body—faint, but there. The mask of control cracked, just slightly.

"There are none alive who remember. I have buried those truths. The world will have forgotten what I was." He tried to shift, but Ethan pressed the hold tighter, forcing the shoulder toward the edge of dislocation. Possessed or not, stronger or not, pain was still pain, and a joint lock still held true.

"You cannot know this," the Betrayer growled. The voice changed again—quieter now, confused. "You… you do know, though." Then the confusion bled into a quick panic and back to cold calculation. "You have seen things, secret things. How? Are there other possibilities of the Wheel?"

The eye closest to Ethan twitched, unfocused. He ground his knee into Tom's spine and wrenched the arm higher. The shoulder joint strained, cartilage grinding audibly. The Betrayer did not cry out. He laughed. Low. Controlled.

Ethan leaned in, tightening the hold. "Maybe so or maybe not. Might be I'm outside the Wheel, just like you said. Maybe the Wheel doesn't even exist…except in your head." he said, his own voice panicked, but exhilarated. Yes, he could mess with this creature's thought process without revealing too much. It was actually kind of fun. "Or I could be a thread in the Pattern that just didn't weave in correctly. Who knows? Maybe I'm the Great Lord testing your faith. What do you think?"

The body under him went still. Tense. Uncertain. "An anomaly," the Betrayer muttered, fevered and cracked. "Not spun. Not woven. Just... forced in." The air thickened. The cell lights suddenly dimmed. The draw on the power tripped an alarm somewhere because strobes starting flashing from the door. The skin beneath Ethan's grip grew cold. Not from blood loss. From something deeper. The world itself seemed to pull back.

Then, a flicker. Tom's body pulsed once. The thing inside him was being pulled, it seemed. Drawn out of him like a…thread from a needle. Not by Ethan. By something older. Stronger.

"No," the Betrayer hissed. "Not yet, Great Lord. Please give me more time."

His voice fractured. Echoed in reverse. The air seemed to be also pulling into Tom's body like he was a sudden vacuum in space or a black hole.

"I will find you again, interloper," he growled, voice vibrating in Ethan's bones. "You have made an enemy this day. It will not be through dreams or borrowed flesh that I find you. I will walk into your world with my own feet. And when I do, I will unmake you."

The final word was swallowed by silence. Then the presence recoiled, as if yanked by chains forged from something deeper than law or power. Tom's body convulsed once. Then again.

Ethan stepped back—just a fraction—when Tom's eyes snapped open. And ignited. Real fire. No metaphor. No illusion. His pupils vanished in a burst of flame that blazed outward, turning his entire skull into a furnace of light. The bone beneath the skin glowed, lit from within like a kiln.

Ethan's reflexes kicked in a split second before it could catch him. "What the—!"

He recoiled as Tom arched backward, mouth gaping in a scream too vast for sound. Fire roared from his throat. His arms thrashed once. Then the skin split. Flames erupted from every pore in a brutal flash of combustion. The explosion was not sonic. It was force. A burst of pressure and heat that slammed Ethan off his feet and hurled him across the cell.

He crashed into the steel door, shoulder first, skull ringing. He scrambled up, reaching for a handle that was not there. Just smooth, sealed metal. Behind him, Tom was ablaze. The stench of burning flesh punched into the air. But no more screaming. Tom was a pillar of purest fire.

Alarms screamed overhead, shrill and immediate. Red strobes flared in the corners of the cell. A second later, the sprinklers kicked in. Ice-cold water blasted from the ceiling, drenching Ethan in an instant. He gasped, blinking against the sudden downpour. Smoke swirled. Water hissed on scorched steel and carbonized bone.

He turned. Slowly. Just enough to look. Tom's body was still upright, somehow. Charred. Blackened. Steam rose from what was left. Then it collapsed inward. Ash and wet cloth folding into itself, the last remnants of flame dying under the flood. The cell reeked of smoke and death.

Ethan leaned against the door, soaked, shivering, staring at the mess of what had once been his cellmate. And the threat still echoed in his mind. I will walk into your world.