Chapter 138 Mysterious Entity
The thing’s finger pressed down like a verdict, and I felt the world compress into that one flat, ridiculous point of pressure. Then darkness, and I tore out of Mother’s mind so violently my ribs cramped. I vomited until my throat burned, retching into the dust and spitting sand and bile. My body folded in on itself as a wave of nausea and adrenaline ran through .
When the heaves subsided, the taste of tal hung in my mouth. I wiped my lips with the back of my hand and tried to think. The vision had not just been a picture but a happening… an event that had happened to . It was intimate and final and obscene in its clarity. I’d seen that blank, white silhouette before in Light’s mories, but never like this: now it had weight and gravity, and it had ‘reached’ for .
“Nick.” Mother’s voice was soft and too familiar. It cut through the aftershock like soone turning a radio back on. I looked up and froze.
She looked wrong. Her skin was the color of washed porcelain. Where a face should have been, there was only a smooth plane at first, and then two black hollows opened like the slow forming of a wound. Not eyes so much as absence. The shape matched the silhouette from the vision, the uncanny facelessness blooming in miniature, right where a human face should be.
“W-what’s happening?” My voice sounded small in my own ears.
She didn’t blink. The black pits regarded with a patient, empty promise. “I believe this was the Prophet’s and the Witch’s true goal,” she said. Her tone was neutral, the way soone reports the weather. “They enabled Light’s arrival here to make you reach your full potential. Light was never ant to be the savior. He was the catalyst that pushed you.”
I stared, trying to make sense of the thing she said. The nausea rolled back up my throat like a second tide. “I refuse,” I spat. “I’m not their puppet. I’m not—”
“You don’t have a choice.” Her voice was calm, but under it I felt an urgency that hit in the gut. “If it offers you comfort, know you were chosen for a reason. I cannot say why. The important thing is you know now. You can gather allies. Take the world by storm if you must. Learn to lead. Save the world from the end that awaits all life.”
The more she spoke, the more the desert around us thinned, as if the words themselves peeled the world back to show sothing that should remain hidden. Her limbs elongated a fraction, fingers bending in a way that made the soft of my empathy itch, an animal alert in the nerve-ends.
“You have to kill , Nick,” she said. The phrase ca out simple, an instruction folded into a lullaby. “Everything will be okay.”
Rage rose first: sharp, hot, pure as a blade. Fury for John, for the people the SRC sacrificed, for the experints and the steady, bureaucratic cruelty of the Directorate that raised monsters from broken children. It should have been easy to hate her… after all, she had been part parasite, part manipulator… but looking at her now, stripped down to this pale thing that wore the entity’s image like a mask, I felt sothing else too: the small, complicated ache of soone who understood what was in front of them.
I thought of Crow and all the hands that had twisted my life. I thought of Light’s monsters. I thought of Missive asleep sowhere in the ruins, fragile as a child and raw as a wound. Every instinct in scread against being the world’s savior. I was a murderer, a thief of bodies, a walking ledger of bad choices. I had no business playing saint.
Still, the prospect of the thing in the sky… call it God if you must… erasing everything I had ever known dragged at an animal part of . The idea of letting everything end because I refused was a selfishness I couldn’t stomach. Maybe that made a hypocrite. Maybe it made worse. But the alternative of doing nothing felt like a kind of death that I could not accept on principle alone.
“I’ll find a way,” I said finally. My voice felt worn and small, but it held steel. I wanted to say it because I believed I could lie. I wanted very much to believe the lie.
Mother’s head tilted, and in the black of those twin holes I read a thing that was not entitlent but absolute, clinical certainty. Through my Empathy, I touched a single, raw thread of honesty. She was not tricking . She was not bargaining. What she said next was filled with certainty.
“There is only one way,” she said. “You must kill .”
Her certainty wasn’t theatrical. It had the plainness of a plan already filed in so cold room: direct, final. I felt it as a pressure in my chest, part command, part plea. For a mont, the world narrowed to two possible motions: take the easy human route and reach for the throat of the thing that had nested in her, or refuse and watch everything unravel.
I tasted blood on my lip, half from my bite and half from the taste of the choice. My hands shook, not from fear but from the beginning of sothing like resolution.
“I’ll find a way,” I repeated. “There has to be another way.”
Her body began to unravel.
The first crack ca from her leg. It was accompanied by the sound of bones snapping, not from fracture, but from inside-out growth. Her shin split, the pale skin opening as sothing dark pulsed underneath, veins swelling and crawling like worms beneath glass. The second leg followed, rupturing with a wet pop as her form stretched and shuddered. Black lines spiderwebbed across her abdon, racing toward her neck.
“Mother!”
Her face, smooth and featureless only monts ago, began to split. Flesh tore down the center, giving way to lips that hadn’t existed a heartbeat earlier. A sound clawed out of her. It was a shriek and a roar at the sa ti, filled with pure agony shaped into air.
“It—touched—,” she gasped, her new mouth struggling to shape the words. “Through——the end—will—manifest.”
Her voice layered over itself, one tone human, the other low and resonant, like sothing speaking from the bottom of a cavern.
I could feel the truth of it radiating through my Empathy: the corruption wasn’t taphorical. The Entity had marked her. It was anchoring itself through her mind and her psychic network… It was an infection of thought given shape. The black veins pulsed with sothing that wasn’t blood but intent.
I hesitated, torn between reason and instinct. Logic scread to flee. Emotion begged to end her suffering. But sowhere between the two, a quieter voice whispered the truth: this was my fault too.
I reached out and touched her forehead. Her skin was fever-hot, slick with black liquid that stead on contact.
“Stop fighting,” I said, though I wasn’t sure which of us I ant.
I pushed inward, forcing the connection…. possession. It was the sa motion as before, the sa bridge between people. For a mont, I was inside the storm again, the shape of her consciousness burning like a collapsing sun.
That was when a voice called to .
“Nick.” It was Silver’s voice.
I froze.
“You don’t have to do this,” said another voice. It was Onyx’s
Their tones wrapped around like echoes from another lifeti. My chest tightened. The warmth, the familiarity, the ache… it was real. But it couldn’t be. They were dead. Gone.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, and I ant it more than I’d ever ant anything.
Emotion tore at . I wanted to save Mother. I wanted to save soone. But the Entity had turned her into a conduit. The voices weren’t Silver or Onyx. Instead, they were imitations, crafted from mory and empathy, from my own vulnerabilities. I could feel the telltale pulse of sothing foreign in their tone, the sa pattern I’d felt in the white silhouette’s presence.
Disgust churned in my stomach. The fear, the grief, the longing… It was all being used.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” I said quietly. My voice trembled, more angry than loud.
The veins on Mother’s skin pulsed, as if the Entity was listening.
I reached deeper, not physically, but through my Empathy. Every emotion she radiated from pain, confusion, and fear, I seized it, twisted it, and pushed back. I gathered every shred of will I had, every ounce of self that was mine alone, and forced it down that connection like a burning current.
“Get. Out.”
The air shook. Her scream fractured into static.
The Entity thrashed, its limbs of impossible geotry. Each of its arms was jagged and shifting, passed straight through , unable to find purchase. Its screams were not made of sound but emotion… a pulse of anguish that would have broken a lesser mind.
But I wasn’t a lesser mind.
I reached deeper, grasping the threads of Empathy the way Crow once did when he killed Silver and Onyx. It wasn’t strength. Instead, it required precision. I mirrored the sa psychic incision, cutting through emotion and thought, dissecting everything that made Mother herself.
She trembled as I held her. Beneath the distortion, I saw her soul. It was thin, desperate, and flickering. Mother had always been an echo, a personality permitted by Missive’s existence. She was never ant to be, only to support. The Entity had exploited that fragility, invading her like rot beneath paint, puppeteering her mind to manifest in this reality.
It wasn’t malice that guided my hand, only inevitability.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, and then I snapped the link.
A scream erupted, not from her throat, but through the world itself. My nose burst, blood trailing down to my lips as the Entity struck back with telepathic fury. Images flashed in my mind of cities collapsing, oceans turning black, stars blinking out. Its empathy slamd into , not as a plea but as a weapon.
“You cannot stop what already is,” said the Entity. “I am the beginning, and I am the end.”
I bit down hard on my tongue until the taste of iron cut through the chaos. “Watch .”
The psychic tendrils lashed again, trying to coil into my mind, but I didn’t let go. I seized its emotions from rage, pride, and hunger, and crushed them under mine. One thought. One feeling. “No more.”
The shrieking dulled. The flailing limbs slowed. As though soone had drained the color from existence, the Entity began to flicker, its white form collapsing inward.
Mother’s body convulsed, the black veins retreating beneath her skin. The elongated bones retracted, reshaping, returning her to her fragile, human self. Her breathing steadied for a second, then stopped entirely.
Missive erged, weak and trembling. She fell forward, knees striking the ground. I caught her before her face t the dirt.
“Mother…” she mumbled in her sleep, voice so small it barely reached my ears. A single tear slipped down her cheek.
I wrapped her in the tattered coat and laid her gently across my lap. She stirred once, murmuring again for the mother who no longer existed. My heart twisted, but I didn’t let it show. With a touch to her temple, I sent waves of calm through her mind with drowsiness, warmth, and silence.
She sighed and went still.
The desert was quiet again. Only the wind moved, whispering through the sand.
Then, a distant thump-thump-thump broke the stillness. I looked up. A helicopter approached from the horizon. The insignia was clear even from afar: SRC.
Missive stirred in my arms, her eyes fluttering open.
“Why?” she whispered, tears spilling freely.
I opened my mouth to answer, but before I could, her body went limp again, fainting into uneasy sleep. The helicopter’s shadow grew larger as it descended, kicking up a storm of sand around us.
"I’m sorry…”
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