Kael's voice was a dry rasp, like stone grinding against bone:
"You aren't even worth the air you breathe,"
In a blur of motion, he was in front of the nearest mobster. His fist drove into the man's gut with a wet crunch through flesh and bone bursting out the other side. When Kael ripped his hand back, entrails spilled free like grotesque streams.
He jerked his wrist, flinging blood in a vicious arc across the floor.
For a breathless moment, the other mobsters froze horror etched into every face. Then, snarling, they found their nerve, drew blades, pipes, and pistols, and charged.
Kael welcomed them.
The first swung a metal pipe. Kael leaned under the blow and drove his fist into the man's sternum; ribs cracked inward like a crushed tin can. As the mobster sagged, Kael grabbed the falling pipe and hurled it with such force that it speared through another man's chest, pinning him to the wall.
Another thug rushed him with a machete. Kael caught the blade bare-handed—felt it bite into his palm and twisted it free. Blood gushed down his arm, but the wound closed itself in seconds, the flesh knitting with unnatural speed.
The machete shimmered in Kael's grip, elongated, stretching unnaturally until it was the length of a short sword.
Kael didn't even notice.
He swung.
The extended blade cleaved through a third thug's torso in a single sweeping arc, nearly severing him in half.
A shotgun blast roared. Kael spun instinctively, a wall of swirling dust and roots erupting from the ground between him and the blast, absorbing the impact.The roots disintegrated a second later, leaving behind nothing but the smoking barrel of a useless gun.Kael dissolved in to smoke, only to solidify behind him, his knee meeting spine with a snap that echoed like a gunshot
The last thug managed to nick Kael's shoulder with a knife. Blood splattered but the flesh instantly wove itself whole again, as if the wound had never existed.
Kael stood alone in the aftermath, surrounded by bodies. His chest heaved, the blood of others dripping from his hands, steaming against the cold air.
The mob boss stumbled backward, terror written plain across his face.
Kael turned his gaze toward him slowly, deliberately.
Panic overtook the boss. He fumbled his pistol from his holster and emptied it toward Kael.
Some bullets hissed and melted midair turning into slag, or else passed through Kael's body harmlessly, the wounds closing as fast as they opened.
Yet with each bullet, Kael felt his strength bleeding away. His limbs grew heavy. His breath ragged.
When the last bullet was fired, Kael's form shimmered into smoke once more and reappeared directly in front of the mob boss.
Kael swung, aiming to obliterate the man, but the punch instead of cratering him, landed with a dull, pathetic thud against the boss's jaw.
The boss recoiled in shock. His lip split and bled slightly... but he was very much alive.
"Well, look at that," he sneered.
Kael staggered, the weight of the stigmata tearing him apart from the inside. He dropped to one knee, barely able to stay upright.
From the corner of his eye, he saw the stepmother shrieking at the mob boss to kill him, kill him now.
The boss sneered, jabbing his finger toward the girl's lifeless body.
"You'll pay for her — and every man you butchered," he spat. "I'll wring every last coin of debt from your corpse!"
He holstered his gun with a snarl, drawing a wicked blade instead. As he stalked toward Kael, he kicked him brutally in the ribs, sending him sprawling across the blood-slick floor. Kael gasped, the impact jarring every broken piece of him, but he refused to cry out.
The boss drew a gleaming knife, savoring every step as he approached.
"What's the matter, tough guy?" he mocked. "Outta gas?"
Kael glared up at him through a haze of pain and rage.
"I'll kill you," Kael rasped, "with a thousand cuts."
The boss laughed, low and cruel.
"Oh yeah? Let's see how you like a few cuts first."
He raised the knife.
Kael tried to lift himself, but his strength was bleeding away—his stigmata, once searing bright, was dimming, like a dying ember smothered by ash.
Each flicker of light beneath his skin grew fainter, like a man drowning who had found no air.
The mob boss sneered as he closed the distance, blade raised high.
But just as he lunged, Kael's stigmata shuddered—then blazed back to life.
It was sudden, violent. Like a man denied breath who sucked in a ragged, desperate gasp.
The lines across Kael's arm burned anew, brighter, fiercer. The temperature of the room seemed to drop.
The boss stumbled mid-step, clutching at himself—no wound visible, but pain blooming in every nerve. He convulsed, thrashing wildly, The boss's screams weren't from pain— but from seeing his own flesh unravel, as if Kael's rage had become visible in his veins.
No one knew what was happening.
Not magic. Not madness. Something else entirely.
Something that turned the mind against its own flesh.
The mob boss screamed and rolled across the ground, his howls clawing at the air.
Kael staggered to his feet, grabbed a fallen blade, and limped toward the writhing figure.
Each stab was mechanical, empty.
Steel sank into flesh.
But the mob boss barely reacted, trapped in a private hell far worse than death. His screams finally faded into broken, wet sobs, then silence.
When it was done, Kael dropped the blade.The room seemed to spin.
He turned toward his sister—still breathing, still smiling faintly even as life ebbed from her body.
He limped to her and dropped to his knees beside her.
"Why?" he croaked, voice raw, mind unraveling.
She didn't speak. Just lifted a trembling hand and brushed his cheek. Then her hand fell, landing with a soft, final thud. Her smile stayed frozen on her face.
Kael knelt there, hollowed out, lost to a maelstrom inside him. Rage. Grief. Self-hatred. Helplessness.
Why? Why had the world twisted itself so cruelly? Why her?
His hands shook.Kael sat there, numb, hollowed out,
Until the stepmother's shriek tore the silence apart. Kael looked up to see his stepmother charging at him, a kitchen knife glinting in her hand, madness distorting her face.
He tried to move.
Tried to lift his arms.
Tried to roll away.
His mind screamed at his body—but it was like shouting into the void.
He watched, helpless, as the blade arced toward his heart.
"I'm sorry," he whispered to the sister he could no longer protect.
"I don't think... I can kill her before I join you."
He closed his eyes and waited for the end.
The blade that homed in on his chest never struck.
Instead, a heavy thud.
Kael forced his eyes open.
Standing over him was a figure cloaked in black, a mask of bone-white porcelain hiding his face. His stepmother lay sprawled unconscious at the stranger's feet, the knife skittered across the floor.
He wore black from head to toe, his clothes stitched from rough, battle-scarred fabric that seemed to drink the light. A long coat flowed behind him like smoke.
But it was the mask that seized Kael's attention: a smooth, porcelain-white face with no mouth, no expression—just two slanted eye slits that glowed faintly from within.
The edges of the mask were cracked, spiderwebbed with thin fractures. Around his neck, tucked half beneath the coat, Kael glimpsed a medallion, an old symbol etched in the center, half-eroded by time.
The masked figure walked towards Kael slowly, looked at him then crouched down, voice low and filled with something Kael didn't yet understand ,hope, fear, awe.
"You have no idea," the man said, "how long we've waited for you."
With those words everything around Kael lost light and he fell down with a thud to the floor .