The silence in the high school gym was a maddening, thick with the smell of blood, sweat, and the low, wet sounds of feeding from behind the locker room doors. Troy stood in the center of it all, a king atop a mountain of offal.
The pain was a crown.
It was a band of white-hot iron fused to his skull. It was the grinding, searing fire in his shattered shoulder—a permanent reminder of the boy who had put him here. It was the gnawing, endless void in his gut, screaming to be filled.
It was eternal. It was exquisite.
He looked down at his hands. The knuckles were raw, the skin split and already knitting itself back together in a grotesque parody of healing. The process itched and burned. He welcomed it. This new, supernatural agony... it didn't eclipse the old pains. It harmonized with them. It was just the latest and loudest movement in a symphony of hurt he'd conducted his entire life.
A cracked mirror hung on the wall near the bleachers, left by some fleeing student. He walked toward it, his footsteps echoing in the vast, empty space. The face that stared back was his, but sharper, harder. The eyes that burned back at him were a sick, phosphorescent yellow.
And in their hellish light, he saw...
...the first pain. The sound of a belt buckle hitting the floor. He was nine, a small boy hiding in the closet, knees pulled to his chest. The shouts from the next room were a familiar storm. His mother's crying, his father's voice, slurred and vicious. "You useless woman... raising a useless boy..." The pain was the helplessness. The terror. The certainty that he was too small, too weak, to ever make it stop. His will to live was forged in that darkness, a single, furious vow: I will never be weak again.
...the second pain. The sting of cheap antiseptic on a split lip. He was thirteen, bigger than the other kids now. His father's "lessons" had evolved. "The world respects strength, boy. Don't you ever cry. You hit back harder." And he did. He found that making others flinch, making them feel small and afraid, made the hollow, scared feeling inside him quiet down for a precious moment. The pain of his own knuckles scraping against teeth was a fair trade for that temporary silence.
Leo had been a perfect target. He was smart, headed for college, everything Troy's father said was "soft." But more than that, Leo's pain was so clear, so honest in his eyes. Crushing him was like shouting into a void and finally hearing an echo. It was proof Troy existed. Proof his strength mattered.
...the third, deepest pain. The cold disappointment in his coach's eyes. He was seventeen. His golden arm was his ticket out of Fall Creek, out of his father's house. A baseball scholarship. He was a local legend on the mound. Then, in a regional final, his shoulder—this same shoulder—gave out with a sickening pop. A torn rotator cuff. The scholarship vanished. The future crumbled to dust. The town that had cheered for him forgot him by the next season. The pain was the failure. The humiliation. It was a deeper, more intimate version of his father's belt. He was right back where he started: powerless, trapped, a disappointment. And the only language he knew to express that kind of pain was to inflict it on others. Leo, with his acceptance letters and his quiet life, became the living embodiment of that stolen future.
The memories faded, leaving only the man in the mirror. The man with the yellow eyes.
A revelation, cold and perfect, settled over him.
This curse... this infection... it didn't give him pain. It recognized the pain already in him. It spoke his native tongue.
The constant, gnawing hunger? That was just the bottomless hollow he'd carried in his gut since childhood, now given a physical form.
The terrifying strength? It was the power he'd always craved to finally silence all his fears, external and internal.
The inability to feel pain from normal wounds? His father had spent a lifetime teaching him to bury it. The curse just made it literal.
His will to live wasn't high despite the pain. It was high because of it. Enduring pain was the only thing he'd ever been truly good at. It was the one skill his father had ever, in his twisted way, praised him for. This curse was the ultimate test. The final, brutal affirmation of his entire life's philosophy. The weak—like the mindless things mewling in the locker rooms—broke immediately. The strong endured. They wore their pain not as a wound, but as armor.
Leo, with his bat, thought he was bringing peace. Offering mercy. But in Troy's eyes, Leo was trying to offer a blanket to men standing in a refining fire. He was trying to rob them of their hard-won victory, their glorious, painful transformation. He was trying to save them from the very thing that had finally made them strong.
A snarl sounded to his left. One of the mindless ones had stumbled out of the locker room, drawn by his presence. It was a former student, maybe a freshman, its body broken and mind gone. Weak.
Troy didn't even turn his head. With a flick of his wrist that sent a glorious, clarifying spike of agony through his ruined shoulder, he backhanded the creature. The blow carried the full force of his new strength, snapping its neck and sending its body crashing into the cinderblock wall with a wet thud.
It was weak. It didn't deserve the gift.
He turned from the mirror, away from the pathetic heap of flesh. The pain was his crown, his scepter, and his proof. He would make this entire town understand. He would make them all strong. He would make them all hurt.
And he would find Leo. Not to kill him.
To thank him.