AN: Happy Saturday. This will be the new upload time... unless something delays me. Happy reading my pretties.
"Yes, yes—a killing machine!" Gander rasped, blood bubbling at the corners of his mouth. "Be what I made you to be. Go ahead, kill me. Make me suffer."
Yu Xi's eyes darkened, the emerald glow deepening into something ancient and monstrous. His rage, long buried beneath layers of restraint, now surged to its peak, a storm without mercy. He had always known his father was crazy, but this reaction was beyond his expectation.
Gander's lips curled into a grotesque grin. "You are just like me," he whispered, voice thick with venom. "You killed your own mother. Just like me. We are no different, Xi Xi."
Yu Xi's breath caught. "Don't call me that!"
But Gander leaned in, smugness radiating from his broken body. "Wasn't that how she called out to you while she died?"
That was the final crack.
Yu Xi snapped.
His psychic power erupted, raw and untamed. The walls trembled violently, panels groaned, and objects shifted and shattered under the pressure. He hadn't learnt how to control it but his powers surged forth unrestrained taken hold by his rage.
Gander's eyes widened. The smugness drained from his face, replaced by something he hadn't felt in decades and that emotion was fear.
He had never witnessed such force. Never imagined his creation could surpass him.
And now, with no alarms triggered and no guards rushing in, he now understood. He was going to die here by the hands of his masterpiece.
Psychic energy erupted from Yu Xi's spine like a tidal wave of glass shards fractal, furious, and incandescent. The Soulforge Mantle, his dormant esper power, had awakened in full, fed by years of buried agony and sharpened by the blade of grief.
The air around him twisted, warping into a storm of memory and rage. Symbols etched in trauma and remembrance ignited into a halo of emerald fire, spinning like a crown of vengeance.
Beside him hovered the sigil blade, an ethereal weapon forged from the agony of his mother's death. It pulsed with wrath, its edge vibrating with the fury of a son denied peace.
Gander lay sprawled on the bed, drenched in his own blood. His lips moved, desperate to speak, but the words dissolved into static meaningless fragments swallowed by the storm. Yu Xi would not allow him the dignity of having last words.
His father's once-imposing psychic aura, a fortress of domination, now unravelled like wet parchment. Yu Xi's power had found the seams in his mind, the fractures in his will, and pried them open with surgical cruelty.
Yu Xi stepped forward. With each movement, the room bent around him. Gravity thickened, pressing Gander into the bed which eventually gave way leaving him pressed down on the cold floor. Bones creaked. Flesh dimpled under invisible pressure. The air grew heavy with inevitability.
Under the full command of his awakened psychic power, Yu Xi's mind slipped into unbidden and vivid memories. He stood once more in that blood-soaked room, watching his mother whisper "I love you" with her final breath, her voice trembling as Xiaobao wailed beside him, a gut-wrenching cry that split the air. And there, Gander, grinning, basking in their agony like a god admiring his own cruelty.
Gander's eyes widened in the present, sensing the shift. He reached out with psychic tendrils, desperate to reclaim control, to dominate the mind he had once molded. But Yu Xi's Soulforge Mantle flared, emerald and furious. The tendrils were caught mid-air, twisted into fractal knots, and shattered like brittle glass.
Gander screamed, not aloud, but psychically, a howl that echoed through the ether. Yu Xi didn't flinch.
He raised his hand, and the sigil blade responded. It sliced through Gander's flesh, powered by every moment of torment, every bruise hidden beneath Yu Xi's clothes, every tear shed in silence. The blade fed on pain, grew brighter, and plunged not into muscle, but into Gander's psychic core.
Gander convulsed violently.
First, his powers unraveled: illusions dissolved, bindings frayed, and mental scaffolds scattered like spectral confetti in a storm of thought. Then his body followed, slowly, agonizingly, as if his soul were being peeled from his skin, layer by layer.
As Gander's final breath rattled out, Yu Xi closed his eyes.
He saw his mother's smile, the way she hummed lullabies even when her ribs ached. He saw Xiaobao small and afraid, waiting for his brother to make the world safer.
The surge that had carried Yu Xi fueled by his rage, memory, and the raw, untempered force of his psychic power, turned on him like a collapsing wave. His knees buckled beneath the weight of it.
The emerald fire that had danced around his body moments before flickered, then extinguished, leaving behind only smoke and the acrid stench of scorched air. Pain bloomed everywhere.
His head throbbed like a war drum, each beat a cruel reminder of what he had unleashed. His limbs trembled, hollowed by the expenditure of power, and his chest felt cavernous, as if something vital had been torn out and discarded. He collapsed.
The cold floor met him with brutal finality. His cheek pressed against the stone, blood smearing in a quiet arc beneath him. The sigil blade dissolved into mist, retreating into the recesses of his mind like a grieving spirit returning to its crypt.
Yu Xi turned his head slowly. Gander lay twisted, lifeless, his mouth frozen mid-plea. The man who had ruled their lives with psychic chains and ritual cruelty was now just flesh silent, still, and irrelevant.
Yu Xi felt nothing. He felt no triumph nor grief. Just a vast, echoing emptiness.
At least there was one less evil person in the world, he thought.
He closed his eyes thinking, let it end here. Let the security come. Let them drag him away. Let them kill him on sight. He had done what needed to be done. Gander was dead and Xiaobao would be free. And now, he was ready to disappear.
But then... nothing.
No alarms blared. No boots thundered down the corridor. No psychic scans brushed against his mind like probing fingers. The silence was unnatural, thick and suffocating, like the world itself was holding its breath.
Yu Xi's senses flared, sharp and sudden. Something was wrong. He forced himself upright, every movement a scream of torn muscle and frayed nerves. His fingers found the makeshift knife he had dropped at some point, slick with blood and trembling. He dragged himself to his feet, swaying, his breath shallow, his vision swimming.
He took one last glance at Gander's twisted corpse then he turned to the door. The hallway beyond was still. Too still.
He slipped out, careful, deliberate. His hand hovered over the doorknob, then paused. He wrapped a strip of cloth tightly around his palm and turned it, leaving no trace.
Down the corridor, he reached the storage room. Yu Xi ducked inside, breath ragged, heart hammering like a warning drum. He leaned against the wall and slid down resting for a moment.