The Phenomena of Fireflies and Star... - Chapter 8: Chapter 8

Maravilla Intersection
Gabriel knew he had to try somehow. Somehow. There had to be a way. He just couldn't let it go. Perhaps not this time. He had to be ready just in case the others wouldn't be able to handle the situation smartly.
The taxi driver had been very gracious to allow him to cut the trip short. Perhaps that was just how it worked in the driver-passenger dynamic despite an earlier declaration of destination. He noted that as he ran forward.
He was just about to reach the intersection, and the people around him had concerned looks on their faces. A wide perimeter had been set up, with specially armed police officers keeping nosy bystanders at bay.
There were plenty of people.
Gabriel knew this wasn't good. The perimeter was wide enough for any potential fight.
He could see past the cluster of people that stayed behind the police that advanced shielding technology was being used. That was good.
It had surely taken them time to use the force field pods. The pods could generate a force field that could effectively stop standard assault rifle ammunition in a consistent stream and even stall a .50 caliber bullet. Gabriel had been privileged as an honorary guest to oversee and test the force field pods' durability against energy attacks. Grenade explosions at the closest range could do so much as disorient the force field for a split-second. The downside was that the force field could only be erected to a maximum of eight feet in height.
A traffic jam had formed in the street he was in, blocked by bystanders, the cops corralling the people, the force field wall, and the operatives inside the force field.
Gabriel observed for a while.
He couldn't see past the force field, which glowed in electric blue and pulsated throughout its translucent body.
He needed to get to high ground
'C'mon,' he thought. 'Think of something.'
He looked up at the surrounding buildings. They would've been evacuated by now. There should be snipers on the rooftops. He looked more scrutinously, confirming his hypothesis. There were snipers on each roof.
'There should be some snipers in some of these windows, too,' he thought. He didn't have superhuman senses, unfortunately. He couldn't see or hear past normal sensory capabilities. If there were snipers on the windows, he'd have to watch out better.
Gabriel stopped just a few feet away from the mumbling crowd of people. There was concern, there was intrigue, and there was an irrational but very human fascination for the rarity of extreme chaos.
'How do I do this?' Gabriel wondered, backing up a bit.
To his left was an empty alleyway.
'Get in position, invisibility, pathokinesis,' he ran down his plans. He'd have to get creative. Discreetly, he slipped into the alleyway, his eyes scanning for security cameras. He scanned thoroughly. There was one above what would be a backdoor up ahead to his right. Beside it was an emergency ladder. As for windows, there were none for either building on either side.
Using his pointing finger, Gabriel flicked a charged photokinetic construct the size of a marble toward the camera before he could get in range. The camera popped and sizzled the moment the small orb made contact.
'Good,' Gabriel thought as he hurried toward the emergency ladder, which connected to the fire escape. He'd have to turn invisible on the first level of the fire escape. There were four. 'Here goes.'
Ames sat at the backmost part of the classroom, observing Geraldine, one of his more reserved but academically accomplished students, as she reported about her critique of Adele Warner's book, "Metamorphose", which was an autobiography highlighting the author's recovery after a series of extreme body modifications that had gone wrong.
Geraldine was doing a good job, showing a mastery of her visual presentation and maintaining solid eye contact with the other students. Ames had tasked all of his English Literature 1 students to critique the writing style of the authors in the respective books he'd assigned each of them to read. He was never really the strict type, but he'd always made sure to inspire refinement in how his students did their work.
Maybe, in that way, he was strict. At least his students weren't terrified of him. That was the last thing he wanted.
For a while, Ames looked out the wide window behind him and observed the activity of the ground below. It was quiet. There were a few students walking about.
There was nothing suspicious.
A loud notification sound rang from his phone, making him jolt a little bit.
"Sorry about that," he said to his class, many of which were startled by the noise. He lowered the Notifications volume before opening what he had just received. It was Eliza.
It came to him that he hadn't really read Eliza's message from earlier, and so he went over it first. He gestured for Geraldine to continue her report before reading the lengthy message.
Although alarmed by the content, it was basically just Eliza telling him to be careful because of the viral conspiracy theory. The next message was from Petra, containing basically what Scott had shared about the Severance Seven earlier.
The message after that, however, was more ominous.
"I know you're in class, but check out the news," Eliza's most recent message said.
'Whoa...,' Ames thought, a peculiarly uneasy curiosity creeping up inside him as he clicked onto the News App. The short loading time was making the whole thing slightly more tense. 'It better not be...'
'Live news videos,' he thought, seeing the thumbnails. They seemed to be videos being captured in the streets. One of them had the IlluManila in the background.
A series of notification rings erupted, startling Ames. His students were just as stunned as they glanced at each other in surprise and confusion.
"What was that...," Brighton trailed off as he clicked onto his phone. The other students did, too. Ames could feel a wave of extreme tension and anxiety sweep over the room. Geraldine herself was starting to get puzzled.
Ames clicked onto the live video showing the IlluManila. Much to his shock, he was bombarded by the screaming from the footage.
"Oh!" one of students gasped in surprise at the sudden noise.
"What the hell...," another one blurted out.
"Hey," Ames said, momentarily raising a reprimanding hand as his eyes remained glued to the scene.
It was a live feed of Current. He had formed what looked like an execution line with people from IlluManila, putting them in a cage of sizzling electricity.
'Oh no...,' Ames's face paled, horror slithering up in his system and threatening to sway him from composure. He looked up at his students, who were staring at him in the wait for an instruction.
"Prof, we could get attacked," Nigel said. Nobody else was talking. It was as if the room had been sucked dry of air.
"Or we might not," Amanda spoke up. "I hope not."
"Either way," Ames said. "We keep our wits about us. For now, we stay calm. Geraldine, get back to your seat. Y'all better start packing while we wait for instruction."
The class followed immediately.
"No matter what happens," Ames spoke again as he made his way to the windows to his left. "We stay sharp and we stay organized."
"I'm scared, Prof," Nigel said meekly.
Ames gave Nigel a determined look. That was something Ames himself could benefit from. Looking at Nigel and the rest of the class, however, was strengthening his will the way he needed it.
"I know," Ames replied, maintaining eye contact. "So am I."
He looked out the window that he was now standing before. He could see the narrow cement walkways poking out from the walls. Maintenance men used the walkways to clean the windows and walls from the outside. It was fenced to about rib level, an estimation based on a person with a height of five foot seven.
To his right, just nearby, was one of the three fire escapes on this side of the building.
Ames looked down at his phone again. Another live video had popped up in the feed. This time, the Sansibar was being featured.
'Gabriel,' he thought, starting to really regret enabling the superhuman's decision out of a shared experience of self-centered longing. 'The city needs Alpha right now.'
Gabriel could see before him, but he had no reflection. He was invisible. He had used his nonprescription glasses and his black shirt as a makeshift mirror earlier for confirmation. He kept his focus on being invisible. He had trained his powers so extensively for so long that he could merely will them into activation. Most of them did.
If Gabriel were to be honest, this could be his fault. Most probably, his disappearance could've inspired this ongoing crisis. He'd just been longing. He'd been longing for decades to not have to be the weapon. It was a selfish ambition that he could justify. He knew he deserved to stop. Sadly, he had outlived everybody he had ever loved and hadn't been given time to mourn. He had become such a convenient asset that Division had forgotten that he used to be just a badly incapacitated man in the 1940s taken in for experimentation.
Gabriel also knew that he had made the crucial choice of entering the life he was now trying to break free from, and it was a choice he had regretted for a long time. He could've resigned or, at least, dealt with the Severance Seven first before leaving.
He had thought he could just run away and abandon everything. He still could run away, but he also could still help from the shadows. He could do that. It would be tricky.
But he could try.
At least, until after he'd taken out all of the Seven.
'Don't I trust my teammates enough?' he asked himself. 'They're not useless without me, and I could've already been replaced.'
He made his way to the topmost level of the fire escape, which had a door leading into the building and another ladder leading to the roof. Gabriel opted for the roof. He kept his footsteps quiet as he ascended the ladder. He then took a peek from behind the edge of the half-wall outlining the roof deck.
'Two snipers,' he counted. 'They're on their knees.'
Gabriel helped himself up onto the roof deck, looking around for other potential detectors before creeping forward. He peered over a puddle of water, gladly confirming that he was still invisible. All he had to do was get a good view of the bus and link empathically with the terrorists. After that, pathokinesis. It could take some time from the distance he was at, but he just needed to make them want to surrender so badly. If he could prevent a shoot-out from happening, that would be great.
He slowly and almost breathlessly moved into position, just three meters away from one of the snipers, who, thankfully, hadn't noticed him at all.
'No shimmering,' he thought forcefully to himself.
Luckily, he could simultaneously use his emotion-based powers and his light-based powers, although his light powers could only manifest in one way at a time. That wasn't a problem.
He could stay invisible and link with the targets.
He made his way close to the edge and eyed the bus below.
'Hmm,' he thought as he stared at a red graffiti of the Severance Seven's seal tagged onto the roof of the bus. 'It's been marked.'
He slowly leaned over the half-wall and locked his empathic focus onto the emotional pulsations he could feel from the bus.
He'd linked with Legion members before. He could never forget the common denominator in their individual emotional spectrums: blind zeal. When superhumans had first come into the public eye, The Legion had wanted nothing more than to co-exist with them. The terrorist group viewed the superhumans as beyond human. It childishly worshipped laboratory experiments that resonated with its cause, and vilified those that tried to stop it.
'I'm getting a mix,' Gabriel thought as he tuned in better. 'I feel fear. I feel panic. I feel a lot of anxiety. I can even feel some surrenders to the possibility of the end.'
'I feel the blind zeal.'
Gabriel tried so hard to not breathe noisily. The negative emotions he was feeling were very strong, and they were starting to get the better of him.
'Focus on the blind zeal. Focus on the blind zeal.'
'I feel...'
'I feel three.'
'I feel three! Three epicenters of blind zeal.'
He got them. He found them. If only he had telepathy instead of empathy, this whole thing would've been a lot easier.
'Focus on the three. Focus on the three.'
He pursed his lips, resisting the emotions that were building up inside of him. They were not his own, but he was getting them in waves.
'These feelings are not my own.'
'Focus on the three.'
He could feel the other emotions slowly receding. He had to make sure he was only focused on the three pulsations. Empathy on one target was a piece of cake. A three-target hit would be a bit of a challenge.
'Focus on the three. Link with them. Allow the vibrations to flow through you.'
As seconds passed, the other emotions continued to fade.
Finally, only the three epicenters remained. They were moving about ever so slightly.
Their blind zeal was so deep and so fiery that Gabriel almost took a deep breath.
'Don't make a sound,' he reminded himself. He still hadn't lost his invisibility. He took a quick glance at the snipers just meters away from him. They still hadn't found him out. They still couldn't see him.
Returning his focus on the emotions he had isolated, he allowed their pulsations to pass through him. He put his focus on making his own emotional pulsation go in-sync. It was hard at first. The epicenters' blind zeal was disgusting and fiery, but after a good twenty seconds, Gabriel could finally match their pulsations. It was a good thing that his emotion-based abilities didn't have a visual aspect. He could work without being detected.
Lingering on the synchronizing pulsations for a while, Gabriel began to overload them with the emotion he wanted the epicenters to be consumed by: the desperate need to surrender.
'Time for some pathokinesis.'
'You want to give up,' he thought, guiding his pathokinetic power. 'You feel it in your heart. Deep down, you recognize that what you're doing is wrong.'
His pulsations became more forceful than the ones he was receiving.
'You want to give up. You want to let these hostages go. You want all this trouble to end.'
Below, the police captain, as it appeared, went on to speak on the megaphone.
'Negotiation,' Gabriel recognized. 'Call for surrender.'
'You feel the urge to surrender. To let these innocent people go. You want to let them go. You know it's right.'
Gabriel had taken control now. His pulsation was pushing back the ones he was receiving. He was overriding them now.
'You will let them go.'
"Nobody has to get hurt," the captain was saying in the megaphone.
Much to Gabriel's voiceless relief, the bus door opened, followed by the frantic and tearful outbursts of the people that had just been liberated. Gabriel wanted to sigh. He even wanted to cheer for it, but he couldn't. He watched as the liberated hostages ran into the safety of the police and were escorted out of the locked down intersection.
'Stay undetected,' he reminded himself, still overriding the targets of his pathokinesis. It was getting hard, but he held on.
"Look! It's the Enforcement!" someone cried out from below.
Gabriel looked over in the distance, happily recognizing Battle Cry as she was followed by three others.
'Three others?' Gabriel wondered, struck with curiosity.
His eyebrows knitted in the realization that he didn't recognize the others that Battle Cry was flying with. They also had different uniforms on.
'I do recognize them,' Gabriel thought, standing corrected upon eventually recognizing Battle Cry's companions. 'Interns. Have they been promoted?'
'Why is Battle Cry alone with Interns?'
'Has it...'
'Has it finally begun?'
'The New Age Initiative?'
Gabriel let out a stressed breath and regretted it instantly. He looked at the snipers to check if they had noticed. They hadn't, but they definitely had their eyes locked in on the bus.
The people below began to cheer. They cheered loudly. For a moment, Gabriel forgot that they weren't cheering for him anymore.
A sudden eruption of gunfire interrupted the cheers, quickly turning them into screams of panic. Gunfire was coming from the bus.
'No!' Gabriel thought in heightened alarm upon realizing he'd lost connection with the epicenters. He tried desperately to reconnect, forcing himself to remain voiceless as he mentally screamed in the strain.
He couldn't. He couldn't reconnect anymore.
Gunfire continued, volleying between the forces. Battle Cry slammed down the hood of the bus in a three-point landing, followed closely by her Interns, who landed on the roof. Their forces shook the bus and shattered its windows. Gabriel then noticed his vision wavering.
It wasn't his vision, he realized quickly. It was the waning field of bent light around him. He could get spotted.
'Dammit,' he thought, backing away from the edge as quietly as he could and sweating in the effort of keeping his invisibility activated. He continued carefully, trying not to accidentally break his illusion. He turned to face the ladder carefully, narrowly avoiding stepping on the puddle he'd looked into earlier.
He couldn't see the ongoing battle anymore, but the screaming and the gunfire continued.
Other strange noises echoed in the open, and Battle Cry's powerful shrieks often cut the mad chorale.
When he made it to the edge, Gabriel grabbed the sides of the ladder and pressed his feet against them as well, proceeding to slide down. He made a soft plop upon landing on the floor of the fire escape. He kept his footsteps as low-volume as possible as he hurried down the levels. Reaching the first level, he vaulted off of the railing and landed on the ground below in a three-point stance, just like he normally did.
Pressing himself against the wall and away from sight, he deactivated his illusion of invisibility. He let out a heavy exhalation, resting his head against the surface on his back.
'You saved the civilians,' he thought to himself. 'You saved them. They're safe now.'
'Let the responders do their job.'
He took a deep breath and exhaled loudly, feeling the beads of sweat down his face and his chest. That secret intervention had taken quite a lot from him.
The fight was still ongoing. Gabriel made his way back out to the streets, seeing a mix of reactions. Some civilians were running away. Some stayed to watch. Before Gabriel could exit the alleyway, however, three people dropped from the air and onto the street: Legion members. They'd been disarmed. They landed on the ground feet-first, but painfully. While they may have been spared from death, they sure looked already very beaten up.
The police outside of the force field perimeter surrounded the hostage-takers as they gazed up in a weakened daze.
"Don't you move!"
"You're going behind bars, asshole!"
Gabriel paused, putting on his glasses and proceeding to do something he had only done when necessary. Gladly, it was something he could turn on and off. He had almost forgotten it, though. He should've remembered to do it sooner.
'Hide my light,' he commanded himself, jumpstarting his focus into lowering his power's energy. He'd been told that his synapses had a strange glow, thanks to his superhuman abilities. Such a thing was only detectable by creatures of elevated perception. He had since learned to dim the synaptic glow by lowering the energy of his powers. If another superhuman with enhanced senses or telepathy or even empathy was around, he could be detected. Being detected was a no-no for him. He felt a certain heat inside of him decrease, continuing to fade out. He allowed it.
And then it was gone. He felt much lighter. He felt cooler.
He moved into a cluster of pumped bystanders and observed for a while as Battle Cry landed on the street, followed by her Interns.
"Get these people to where they're safe, Captain," Battle Cry instructed. "There are other attacks happening. It could get worse. The others are already onto them."
'The others?' Gabriel wondered. 'The New Age Initiative has really begun, hasn't it? They're promoting every Intern into the Enforcement?'
'Also, other attacks happening?'
"Why is this happening, Battle Cry?" the Captain demanded as his men and other responders retrieved the incapacitated terrorists.
"Alpha's gone," Battle Cry replied with a grim expression on her face.
"Well, goddamn," the Captain snarled, rubbing the back of his head.
"Don't worry," Battle Cry said, raising a hand to signal to her Interns before they all began levitating. "The New Age Initiative has been activated."
With that, she flew away with her Interns. They flew off fast.
'Multiple attacks ongoing,' Gabriel thought, his throat tightening as the guilt outweighed the selfish ambition he'd been trying to justify. 'The New Age Initiative was not fully refined yet. Was I really that valuable? Is my team's force really depleted without me?'
"Captain," a police officer approached the Captain. "Erencio got shot in the shoulder, but he'll make it. Nobody else injured."
'A cop got shot.'
'I...,' Gabriel's thoughts were losing coherence.
'I don't know how I'm going to navigate this,' Gabriel thought as he slipped away from the crowd and walked away briskly, sinking further into the conflict that was tearing him up from the inside. 'This is my fault.'
"There are other attacks happening," he muttered to himself, a tear falling down his face followed by another. His guilt continued to gnaw at his heart, constricting his chest.
Gabriel continued to walk. For someone who had been everywhere in the Philippines, he surely felt rather lost right now.
He could hear noises up ahead. They sounded like live news reports.
'News reports,' he realized, seeing an electronics shop up ahead on his side of the road.
"OmniView Electronics," he read the signage poking out from the wall. He ran toward it, finding himself looking through the window and into an interesting setup of a dozen high-definition television screens showing different news channels at once. He'd seen a similar store set-up for television sets back in the 1990s.
As his eyes scanned the live news reports, his heart continued to descend deeper and deeper into the cold and haunting blackness of guilt that had been consuming him. He could see people running away, hostages panicking in the crossfire, and Enforcers—both old and newly promoted—duking it out against members of the Severance Seven. The explosions that appeared on the TV screens echoed at various seconds later in the environment. Near and far, there was chaos.
Gabriel looked around him as people began to panic again, bothered by frightening sounds, the sources of which they couldn't see. Some of them ran. Some of them walked uncertainly. Also, most of the cars had been left behind in the jam.
'Omni. IlluManila. Sansibar. The Aviary. Casa Superiora. MultiMart. St. Raphael's.'
"This is all my fault," Gabriel muttered, his voice cracking as more tears came.
"I hope Ames is safe."
"He might need me."
Ames looked up from his phone, dazed by the madness he had witnessed. Whether or not they were to be attacked, classes should've already been cancelled at this point.
"They got Saint Raphael's Hospital," Ames reported, pressing a hand against his chest at the thought of the people inside the hospital, who were now struggling against their fates and the demon that had come to aggravate them.
"Lord, have mercy," Geraldine blurted out, her breathing heavy.
'Why did I let him go?' Ames thought, trying to set his own breaths straight. His heartbeat went on in a consistently elevated state, plagued by the guilt he was feeling. 'This is my fault. I could've stopped him. I could've stopped him and made him stay.'
"No deaths as of yet," Brighton shared, looking at his phone. "Many were injured, though. None too fatal. Some were rather serious but not fatal."
Ames looked at Brighton, squinting at the information he was sharing.
"No deaths?" Ames asked. "Don't get me wrong. All these attacks, and no deaths?"
The students looked at him, not knowing where he was getting at.
Ames, however, found it very odd. Convenient, even.
'And Malign hasn't attacked yet,' he recalled. 'If at all.'
"Attention, everybody," the school speakers blared. "The school administration has decided to call off all classes and office activities for the rest of the week, effective immediately. All the school buses are now prepped for transport. We have also coordinated with Herrera Transit to supply us with ten more buses, arriving in the next ten minutes. Everybody is requested to convene on the main ground and to evacuate in an organized and calm fashion. Your teachers and the Gonzales E.R.T. will assist you."
"Alright," Ames said to his class, standing up from his seat and heading for the door. He gestured for his students to not rush as they stood from their seats. "Calm and organized. You heard the President."
"I can't wait to go home," Amanda muttered as she put on her bag. "Goddamn Seven."
Ames opened the door before him and went out first, gesturing for the students to pair up and go out in twos. They followed the instructions without protest.
"Buddy system," he said, standing aside for them to exit. The other classes nearby had also begun exiting. Scott taught next door, and the guy had also just begun extracting his students.
"You alright, Doc Ames?" Scott inquired.
"As always," Ames replied, smiling reassuringly. It was forced, and he was never known to hide emotions completely. Still, Scott smiled back in kind.
The moment all of Ames's students had exited the room, he securely closed the door and assumed his position at the head of the two lines.
"Follow me and stay close," he instructed.
He and Scott proceeded to escort their students down the stairs. The other teachers and their classes had also begun evacuating.
He looked back at his class as he led them down the stairs, giving them an encouraging smile, which they returned after a moment of insecurity.
"We're gonna' be okay," he said to them, noticing one of the janitors passing by casually, having exited the restroom of the floor from where they'd come. It was strange to Ames how nonchalantly the janitor had passed by.
'They're probably gonna' check all the rooms after we've all gone,' he thought. He then continued forward, trying to recall where he'd seen the man before. The man had looked familiar, and yet interestingly, not really. It had to be the mid-length hair. Ames knew he'd seen it somewhere before. He'd also only seen the janitor's side profile. 'Must be a new janitor.'
Ames decided to shrug it off as they made a turn on the staircase.
Ames was no stranger to the faces of the workers in Gonzales. He knew every face, even the newly hired, across all the positions. It was his thing. He'd always made sure to make as many friends or, at least, acquaintances as possible. Networking at the workplace had always been important to him, especially as someone who liked to work overtime.
As Ames descended the next set of steps to the next floor, however, he couldn't shake off the feeling that something was off.
'Gonzales implements a certain image that male employees need to maintain,' Ames recalled as he stepped foot onto the next floor. 'It was old-fashioned like that. And so male workers here kept their hair short.'
Ames stopped abruptly, his class pausing in their descent behind him.
"Prof?" Nigel asked. "You okay?"
Ames looked back at him. At the rest of them. Something was off. Very off.
Scott seemed to have noticed. Ames looked over at him, finding him ushering his class down the stairs.
"Doc Ames, if you're not feeling well--," Scott started.
"Hey, um, Doc Scott?" Ames interrupted, maintaining his calm. "Can you escort my kids down to the ground, please?"
"Yeah, sure, um...."
"I forgot something in the room."
"Alright, sure."
"Alright, people," Ames turned to his students again, trying to maintain the facade that nothing was off. "Go with Prof Scott. I just need to retrieve something I left behind."
His students looked at him curiously at first, but he knew what he was doing.
"Now," Ames repeated sternly.
"Okay, Prof," Brighton replied, nodding at the others to relay the instruction. "Take care."
"Of course, Bright," Ames said, patting the student's shoulder once before going back up the stairs.
'There's something very wrong here,' Ames repeated in his head. He couldn't help but feel a chill down his spine, but he kept his poise. 'Come on, Ames. You're tough. I know you're not proud of it now, but you were a Signos.'
He made a turn and went up the next set of steps to the upper floor. He rolled up his sleeves the moment he reached it.
The corridor to his left was basically empty. However, it didn't feel so.
Ames walked into the corridor, staying alert as he carefully took each step.
He was internally hitting himself on the head for what he was doing. It didn't make sense. He was no fighter. Plus, he didn't know what he would do with what was bothering him. He wasn't even sure why he was going this far. All he knew was that his gut told him something was very wrong and that trouble was brewing. Years he had spent screwing around as an ex-member of The Signos Gang had seen him getting into fisticuffs with other young and rivaling gang members, but that was it. Leaving that life behind had led him to focusing his energy on academics. His athletic ventures thereafter hadn't been combative in nature. Sure, he was good with firearms, but he was in a school and acting off a hunch. He wasn't about to make a complete fool—or a criminal—of himself by bringing a gun to a supposedly safe learning environment.
He walked out of the corridor and into a semi-open area that opened to the view of Falco's impressive buildings to his left and to the university ground below to his right.
There stood the man.
Ames could feel a skip in his heartbeat.
The man in the violet janitor uniform was leaning on the railing of the balcony that overlooked the ground. He stood there, backed turned toward Ames, tall and quiet.
'He looked very familiar,' Ames dreadfully thought as he made his way to the center of the open area carefully.
"Excuse me, sir," he called out, raising his voice to mask the tension boiling inside of him. "If you're not going to check on the rooms, it would be best if you go down to the ground with us."
The man didn't reply. Ames stopped just about two meters away. Something about the man standing still and ignoring him completely sent arachnid sensations down his back. They were cold and intimidating sensations.
But Ames braved through them.
"I said, sir--," Ames didn't finish.
The man let go of the railing, and with a slow but confident turn, he revealed his face.
Ames felt as if he'd been disemboweled, as if his blood had been quickly drained from his body. His voice croaked a bit, his heart beating fast. The man's face was more than just familiar. It was forever embedded in Ames's memory. The familiarity of the man's hair made sense now.
Ames's fear began to turn into a roaring surge of anger as everything flooded back to him in violent flashes. All of his memories and all of his pain felt like twin tsunamis converging onto him, and he gathered all his wits as he shouted in the face of the man with the most haunting, most intimidating, most electric pink eyes that contrasted the paleness and the shadows of his face.
"It's Malign!" Ames shouted with all of his might. "Everybody, get out now!"
It was the loudest he'd ever shouted.
He caught for a split-second a glimpse of those electric pink eyes flaring up to a fierier state before Malign reached out his hand.
Ames could hear the shouts of alarm and hurried footsteps from the floors below and from the ground.
A strong force wrapped itself around Ames's neck in a blink. He gagged and coughed in desperation as he clawed at nothing.
'No!' he thought in resistance as another invisible force began to burn into his brain.
"Aaaackhhhh!" Ames's scream was shrill in its constriction, and his brain hurt so terribly that it was as if somebody had started squeezing it. "Hnrrrrh!"
"Smart man," Malign hissed, walking forward calmly. The closer he got, the more Ames wanted to tear his own brain off.
And yet he couldn't.
His brain felt like it was on fire, and the haunting look of darkness on his assailant's face was the most terrifying image he'd ever had to see.
"I hate sharing the title," Malign added, his head tilting.
"Hnrrrhah!" Ames fought, his hand frantically groping for the pepper spray. It was as if he would run out of air any second.
And then he grabbed it.
And he uncapped it.
"Same!" he snarled as he struggled in his strangulation. With a quick pull, he aimed the pepper spray right at Malign's face.
"I hate it, too," he added, pressing onto the button. Malign's look of alarm was a good sign. A steady stream of pepper spray formula landed right into Malign's eyes.
At once, the forces that put Ames in so much pain disappeared. His neck and his head throbbed so badly as he buckled on his knees, landing on all fours with his pepper spray dropped aside.
Malign began screaming as his face burned with the formula, and he staggered violently in the attempt to numb the pain.
'That was close!' Ames thought as he scurried for the pepper spray. 'Son of a bitch!'
Heartbeat at an increased rate and anger resurfacing at full force, Ames grabbed the pepper spray canister and launched himself onto Malign's body, slamming the superhuman right onto the railing.
"Hah!" Ames shouted out at the force he had to exert. Malign gasped out at the impact on his back.
'This bastard's tough!' Ames thought as he felt how much it had taken from him to actually knock the wind out of Malign.
Ames struggled to regain his balance for a bit, but when he did, he sent a clenched fist right into Malign's throat.
"Here's one for you!" he snarled, body vibrating with adrenaline.
His fist stung a bit upon impact.
Ames paused for a split-second at the sight of Malign choking at the force and his eyes flickering in the tension.
"Saved that for you, asshole," Ames added, throwing another punch, this time directed at Malign's nose.
But it didn't get there.
Malign had grabbed his fist.
Once again, those menacing eyes regained their fire, and they looked right into Ames's.
'Oh no,' Ames realized.
He couldn't move.
'I--,' he thought in panic upon the realization that he couldn't move his arms and his legs. 'I can't move!'
"No!" Ames shouted at Malign's face, resisting the fear that was clawing its way back into his mind. He couldn't. He couldn't let Malign overpower him this time, even if he were to perish at the monster's hands.
"I remember you," Malign hissed tauntingly, his voice sizzling in small echoes. "I remember your pain. Do you?"
Ames couldn't stop the assault of the images he'd tried so hard to remove from his brain. His mind began to burn with ceaseless images of Harvey. Ames's every cherished memory of Harvey was quickly being violated and corrupted with the image of the man's soulless face on his living body. It was like losing Harvey again and again and again.
An overwhelming spiral of dread and sorrow took Ames down further and further, his resistance manifesting in the tears that now ceaselessly streamed from his eyes.
'I love you, Harvey...,' he remembered the words that he could've said to Harvey a million times more than he already had.
He remembered the fire that had refused to leave his heart since that night, and how it had led to this.
"No...," he managed, his tears pouring from him.
"Such a strong mind," Malign taunted.
An absolute, soul-crushing silence suddenly filled Ames's mind. He looked Malign right in the eyes.
"Such a breakable body," Malign concluded, moving forward at blinking speed.
Ames could feel Malign's hands on his midsection for a second, and then he felt himself being thrown.
"No!" Ames cried out as he felt himself flying off the floor, distance building between Malign and himself as he shot out of the building's open space.
'Harvey!' he thought tearfully as he curled himself into a ball. He was flying off fast. Anytime now, he could crash and die. 'I love you.'
Anytime now, he could hit something and it would be over.
He shut his eyes and unleashed another desperate thought.
'Gabriel!'