章 25: Issue #23: First Blood
Issue #22 is up. I forgot to schedule it. I apologize!
...
I scream with all my life and rush forward, jumping up to force his gaze upwards. His eyes follow my winding hands, but not my feet as I drop my feint and push my left foot to hit his chest.
He narrowly blocks the hit when he pulls his arm back, but the force behind my blow makes him take a two steps back. I land on the wet ground with unsteady feet to find his left palm swinging to the side.
I duck underneath the palm, strafing to the left of me and find myself skidding an inch past what I mean to stop. The mistake cost me a moment of uncertainty which Scythe used to bring back an elbow.
He's too strong, too damn strong. His bone breaks my nose and sends me stumbling back against the door of the stall, eliciting fearful gasps from the women inside.
He follows through with a right hook which hits nothing but plastic and metal. My body slides through the wet floor before quickly adjusting my positioning, just as he notices my presence to this side.
Bruce taught us many fighting techniques in the four months that followed the incident on the Ferris wheel. Although most of them were shallow and merely foundational basics, there were a few that he was adamant we learn and perfect it in a few weeks' time.
One of which is called Vital Points.
I unleash a barrage of heavy strikes on a concentrated point on the Scythes' side, mainly doing kidney shots. I manage to knock in seven hits before he can push me off, which momentarily inhibits his fighting capabilities.
I take a few moments to steady myself, shoes squeaking out spurts of water that have made the floor difficult terrain. Fortunately, he also takes a step back, grabbing a hold of the edge of the bathroom stalls to steady himself.
"You're a tough son of a bitch!" He says through heavy breathing.
He walks forward with confidence, but I can see the slight limp on his left leg, pointing to a sense of pain on the left side of his body. As he passes by my mother's stall, his pace increases and arrives before me with a winding arm.
I put both of my arms up to block the hit yet is still thrown back, back hitting the edge of the sink counter. Pain from my arms and back assaults my body as I try to stand up, only to find his hands grabbing the edges of my shirt.
I thrash around to no avail as he heaves me up to my height and throws me back onto the floor. The air leaves my lungs when my elbows bounce off the floor and hit my ribs, causing me to grasp and spasm in pain.
"ARGH!" I roar in anger when he grabs me once more, thrashing around his hold as I smash my forearm on his legs.
He groans in pain when one of my hits strikes his shin, so instead of throwing me on the floor again, he carries me until I'm an arm's length higher than him and smashes me in the bathroom mirror.
The mirror makes a head-ache inducing sharp noise the moment I hit its surface, sending glass shards all across the room. Mirror shards that are not stuck to my skin or breaks in one large piece are washed away by the running water.
Not only is the floor difficult terrain, it has also become dangerously bloody.
"Shut the fuck up!" He roars, following up his smash with a hit to my body. He grabs the hem of my shirt and pulls me from over the counter and onto the ground, where blood from my wounds is continuously washed away by the gushing water.
I control my breathing before conjuring a small vertical line at the palm of my hand. I gaze under the sink counter, locking onto the bear spray. For the past week, I have experimented not only with my portal generation's energy usage and repetitive creation, as well as the size and orientation of the portal.
Although I have yet to figure out how to–as Bruce said earlier–move the portals once it was created, I had a breakthrough in how and where the portals appear.
A horizontal line appears below the bear spray that widens into an active portal, slipping the bottle into my hands, just in time for the Scythe to catch his breath and go back to beating the shit out of me.
As his figure looms over me, arms descending into my form like an over-sized ape that I have been smiling at for decades, I turn around and face him. The surging pain from the sticking shard embedding further into my skin cautions me about the danger to my body, but I pay it no heed as I spray half the contents of the bottle in his face.
The fine crimson mist sticks to his face before being dragged downwards, getting some into my eyes. I push through the pain and drag my feet upright, checking to see that the Scythe is still thrashing around in complete agony.
"You motherfucker!" He shouts as he removes his wet mask that has soaked the mist and mixed in with the water, thereby burning the front of his face.
He doesn't care about the pain anymore, sending a haymaker, which I block with crossed arms. The blow launches me a few dozen centimeters off my feet and crashes my body into the tiled wall.
He sends another haymaker, but with the mist in his face severely limiting his depth perception, not one of the three follow-up punches hits my body and face. I duck another punch, rolling past him and kicking him in the shin.
When that doesn't bring his form down, I bear down the full force of my foot on the back of his knee. Once he kneels down to my level–either in pain or in sheer reflex–I pound my forearm on the nape of his neck.
Unfortunately, I got so engrossed in my attack that he caught my left forearm and used a rudimentary version of an over-head judo throw on me. With the sheer strength of his arm, my body flies through the air and smashes against the tiled floor.
Like the mirror from earlier, the smooth finish on the tiles does not prevent my shoulder blades from cracking its surface and the back of my neck to tear apart by the shards of tiles.
The Scythe does not let go of my body, even though I can barely see what he's doing. He drags me along towards the center of the room before grabbing my belt and throwing my body towards the already-destroyed mirror.
A surge of pain courses through my body, eliciting a bout of agonizing yell out of me.
"Edmund!"
"Maria, no!"
Their stall shakes with great intensity as mother screams in murderous rage. I wanted to stop her and tell her that I'm alright, but the Scythe stands in my way.
"Is that your mommy in there?" Scythe asks with a grin on his face.
He stalks closer to the stall where my mother and Rachel are, whistling arrogantly as he traces the surface of the door.
"You open that and I cut you into pieces like the motherfucker you are." I threaten, nearly snarling with hate in my eyes.
I fall down to the floor, shakily removing the shards of glass that are yet to embed itself upon my flesh. Heavily unsteady and trembling from the blood loss, I scrutinize his form.
The Scythe barks a bout of laughter before gazing at me with murderous eyes. "Am I supposed to be scared by an entitled brat?"
"No," I answer, clenching my fist as I ready a portal. "You should be terrified."
He rushes forward with a roar, blind from the anger I have wrought in his poverty-stricken heart. The length between him and I is as short as his temper and, in a blink of an eye, he is mere inches away from me, swinging his right fist down to me.
Time slowed to a crawl. The Scythe's fist is still dangerously aiming for me, albeit at a slower pace. Enough pace for a black line to appear ten centimeters away and in between my face and the fist's downward trajectory.
Without another second to waste, the line widens into an unobstructed view of an inky void which suddenly changes into that of Scythe's side view of his head. I could see a part of him pull back a little, but the downward force of his fist had accumulated enough momentum to instill a sense of certainty to its path.
The fist passes through the main portal before emerging on the other side and hitting himself in the ear with his own fist. The force of the blow is enough to knock him off his feet, slipping on the wet tiled floor and banging his shoulders on the bathroom counter.
"What the fu–ARGH!"
I cut off my connection to the portal, something I do with ease. Both portals snap shut, but unlike the last time I did this, something is in its way.
Like an extremely sharp elastic band that keeps rebounding off of an object, the portal flays off the flesh on the Scythe's arm. He tries to remove it, but there's a half a second long dissonance between the two portals' bounce, preventing him from fully taking it out.
"Waaah! Waaaah! Help!"
The Scythe keeps screaming as he slides his arm in an excruciatingly slow manner, blood spraying on both ends of the portal. Every time he tries to pull it out like a fleshy version of the tablecloth whip-off trick, the portal would burrow deeper into his forearm and cause more blood to gush out.
He wriggles like a worm as he kneels down to prevent his arm from being cut out under him and in doing so brings his head to my height.
"Does it hurt?" I whisper before vomiting my late lunch around his straggling legs. "Sorry."
I trudge towards the sink and, with bleary eyes, grab a jagged piece of mirror. Large enough to fit the palm of my hand and thick enough not to break at the slightest resistance.
"AH! I'll fucking kill ya-argh!"
Sauntering closer and letting the jagged end of the shared trace the rim of the sink, a feeling of immense burden pressures my body into a fit of laughter. There's an inkling in my brain that is reminding me of the consequences of my action.
This guy right here knows who I am, knows who I love, and what I am capable of. Not even my mother is aware of half the things this man knows about me.
'Should I kill him?'
I look at him, struggling to breathe and live as the portal hacks into his arm. The pain inhibits him from seeing the bigger picture and from seeing the mirror shard in my hand.
At least until he looks at me looming over him. Eyes widening in fear, Scythe razors in anger, scraping his legs on the tiled floor so that the rest of his arm doesn't fall below the portal's height.
"You can't fucking kill me!" He yells, dragging his arm through the portal in a slow measure.
"I don't want to." I reply, inching closer and not at all fearful of his retaliation.
While I may have lost tiny amounts of blood in the past few minutes, the large gash on his arms is like crimson waterfalls. I can already see the hints of paleness and madness evident in his face and eyes.
"You don't have the balls to kill me! Once I get out of here, I'm gonna make sure your mother–"
I leap forward, using the weight of my body and the momentum of my jump to embed the jagged mirror onto the side of his neck. I scream away the hesitation in my bones, hammering the hand that wields the mirror to further embed the weapon into his neck.
"Thank…you." I whisper through gritted teeth as I feel his free arm pound my back in retaliation.
Although strong at first, ever succeeding strikes to my back grow weaker until he doesn't have enough strength to lift his arms. I remove the mirror out of his neck, blood gushing out like the faucet above us.
His eyes, bright and full of hopes and dreams, grow dimmer by the second. I let go of the shard, clattering down the flooded floor before shattering into a dozen pieces.
"W…Why?" He asks as I maintain eye contact until the light in his eyes extinguishes.
"Thank you…" I whisper as I break in a choking sob, "Thank you for making it easy."
The pain, emotions, and adrenaline of the fight bears down on me like a freight train, causing me to stumble back into the stalls and shudder in the influx of its overwhelming combination.
Although my brain knows the deed that I had done, my heart is pounding in fear of rejection and dreadful anticipation.
'I just killed someone.'
It overwhelms my body that I didn't even notice his hanging arm flopping into the flood and the portal ceasing to exist.
"E-Edmund?" Rachel's voice brings me into the present, allowing me a short reprieve from the sensation wrecking my body. "Are we–"
"Don't–Do not leave. It's not safe yet." I yell, hiding the agony from my wounds and broken bones.
Just as I thought everything would be fine, another Scythe appears on the broken down door. Bloodied, beaten, broken, but unbowed, the man stumbles inwards with a gawking and unbelieving expression on his face.
Fear runs through me, coursing through my body like electricity. I could barely one yet here is another one, albeit more or less half of the combat ability of the guy I just killed.
I force myself to stand up, but instead slip on the muddied crimson water and stumble on my ass once again. Before I know it, I'm crawling through the water towards him, a shard of mirror in my bleeding hands.
The gnawing hunger within my stomach grows deeper, seemingly intent on cannibalizing my body to release enough energy to function my nervous system.
The man inches closer, gazing at his dead comrade before turning towards me. But before he can do or say anything, Bruce appears behind him like a shooting star on a moonless night.
With one mighty chop on the back of the Scythe's neck, the man goes unconscious, falling down to the ground and hitting his head on the tiled floor.
Relief floods my system, adrenaline subsiding to make way for the indescribable pain. A familiar pain, one that has accompanied me through these past six months.
Before my bleary eyes close and most of my organs shut down from being fed upon by my powers, I see Bruce looking at the dead Scythe behind me.
He opens his quivering mouth and utters, "Edmund… what have you done?"
"I… I don't know."
•••
A little short, but since it's a 2k word fight, figured it's alright.
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