Chương 407: A Glimpse (VII)

Master gave her a mission! Though it came from silly brother Tao, he told her it was their Master's idea. Master needed her to do something, and she was going to do it no matter what! Light didn't like the city that much; it felt stuffy and hot, and people were looking at her weirdly, with a few even trying to grab her or thieve from her. They thought her a lost little lamb, and out came the darkness in them.

She liked when they were in the mountains, cloaked in dark and shadows, scattered between the trees, with the howls of the wolves echoing into the night. But she knew they wouldn't be going back to the mountains for a while. The mission was simple--all she had to do was make a man die. But not immediately.

"In a few months, or even years," silly brother Tao said. All people but her Master were bad, Light knew; but for somebody to be condemned by the kindest man in the world... she silently wondered just what devils her target bore. Was he so evil that even her Master was unable to see the good in him? The man who saw the good in her? She walked for a good while as the night fell deeper and deeper. They were to depart tomorrow morning, so she did not have that much time. But... she was not in a hurry.

To most, if not all, she was the weakest of their little group--even the dummy sisters of hers were stronger, bigger, and faster. Even that new pup that Master adopted not too long ago had reached Foundation Establishment before she did. It seemed as though she had no talent, she had no future, and she would only ever be the little girl that got to travel the world with them. But... Silly Brother Tao and Master knew.

Even that old, slimy, often-scared-of-her alchemist that would make pastes and baths for them seemed to know something. She was not weak. She was merely... different. She reached the strange compound; even from the outside, she could feel the odd fluxes of energy bouncing against each other. Like two torrential storms beating against the same bell, but the bell would never ring. For the moment it did, it would be destroyed.

Rather than sneaking in, she merely walked through the front--in the shadow and dark, she was a ghost. An imperceptible thing. An invisible breeze. The gardens were pretty, but she ignored them. She ignored the buzzing insects, the birds asleep in their nests, and the critters burrowed under dirt. All life, however faint or dying, was bared in front of her. She could see it all--as though there were hands of a clock ticking above head, counting down to their moment of death. You might be reading a pirated copy.

Look for the official release to support the author. She walked past it all and headed toward the central mansion--glow of lights bled out of the windows, with distant coils of music turning discordant. There was pain, deep in there. Suffering. Agony. There was death. Off her feet she flew, levitating upwards soundlessly until she reached one of the upper, ajar windows, slipping through and landing into a wide, gaudy hall. Paintings hung off the walls, with statues of gold between them.

Ignoring it all, she headed left and then straight forward, heading deeper and deeper, toward the sounds of misery. There was nobody here--not a maid or a servant to be found, not even a guard. Just silence and embers of the gems embedded into the walls, glowing. The chamber of suffering was located at the far end of the building, nestled in a corner, hidden away.

There were no decorations around it, no silver grand doors leading to its interior; there was a wooden nook and about a thousand arrays trying desperately to keep what was inside hidden. But she could see it. Her twilight eyes glimmered with light as the image began to form. There was a man standing, long whip in hand, wholly nude, and there were a dozen before him, men and women alike, lashed across their backs and fronts, delimbed, detongued, utterly broken, and wailing.

And the man was grinning, the red of blood dotted across his curved lips. There was madness in his eyes, madness vastly different than Light's own--it was uncontrolled, unhinged, the ilk that consumed the sanity. He laughed, a grating sound to behold, as a young woman at the end of the row wailed; she tried getting up and running toward the doors, her body covered in gashes and rips from head to toe.

She couldn't get much further from her spot before a whip latched onto her neck and pulled--she gagged, slipping and falling down so violently that her elbow snapped, tearing her arm in half. She screamed in pain, but the man only laughed even harder.... did Master know? No. Perhaps her Master felt that the man held great evil in himself, but he would not have known. Her Master would have collapsed at the sight of this and wept, his heart a cauldron of ache for all dozen of those suffering.

Most evil, her father used to say, was cold; it did evil as a secondary means to their goal. Kidnap a wife of a famed general and turn him. Kill a four-year-old boy because his talents threatened those in power. But that evil did not indulge in vile acts of self-gratification; it was calculative, manipulative, and lasting. Some evil, however, was merely... broken. And Light could see it--she could see all of it. Most people she looked at had cracks in their skins--invisible to others.

There would be plumes of black occasionally drifting out but not much else. Some others had pieces of their flesh missing, revealing ashen flakes beneath. And some, like that man, were gnarly amalgamations of smoke and shadow. Broken until it was no longer human. She reached out with her right arm and unfurled her fingers; she could not easily kill those eschewed in light. In fact, she was fairly certain that there would never come a day she would be capable of defeating, let alone killing, her Master.

But those who've surrendered to the darkness? Those whose souls were mere husks of humanity? She was to be the Demon God, the sovereign of shadows and ashes and all things broken, the ruler of the infinite void. If she could not kill some broken pup who had lost its ways... she would be unworthy of the crown. Her tiny body began to float as plumes of twilight sprouted around her like feathered wings--her countenance drifted, her true form being revealed.

Underneath the guise of a girl there was a visage of ephemeral fire--black and gray like the night and cinders. Her white hair shot upward like flames, edges of her eyes pulsating with vapors, while her lips quivered once. A command was given, unheard and unknown. A single wisp of the immaterial bled through the walls and found its way to the man, embedding itself right between his brows. He continued to laugh, none the wiser. Eighty-four days, seventeen hours, forty-four minutes, and nine seconds.

The countdown had begun.