JUNE 17th, 2014.

Seth heaves, fully standing up and continuing to stare at Vain, who slowly approaches him.
Vain shrugs his shoulders, holding his hands out to his side, level with them with a smug look on his face.

“Was 400 a little too much for you?” he asks Seth, with a mocking smile and a sarcastic tone of voice. “See... I’ve got a problem with overcompensating.”

Seth leaps for his pistol that lies in front and to the right of him on the ground, only slightly covered by the doorframe from Vain’s perspective. Grabbing it and using his momentum to roll over, he turns toward Vain at a breakneck pace and fires two rounds at his head.

“Utilize. 15 milliliters.”

The two bullets land directly against his cheek and next to his mouth, shattering against his face and sending flying minuscule shards of metal around him. As the shards fall away from his face, hardened small dots of blood are visible under where each bullet had hit. Seth watches the shards fall onto the ground in shock, scattering before his feet as if they were originally made of fine, fragile glass.

I thought those had hit. Did I miss? No… that’s not it.

“Embody. 45 millimeters.” Vain cuts him off, staring down at him.

After he says this, tiny spikes of blood, the diameter of which is identical to the wounds he sustained on his face, extend all the way from where he stands to pierce Seth’s shoulders against the wall behind him, effortlessly passing through his body and pinning him there. Seth winces in pain as it feels like two small needles just shot through his body, as he slams the side of his pistol against them, breaking them off. They remained lodged in his shoulders, still stabbed into the wall behind him. He raises his gun to fire out of instinct but realizes just before he pulls the trigger that he’d only be worsening his situation.

Vain notices his realization, and cocks his head, laughing at Seth. He can’t get enough of seeing Seth out of breath, blood running down his head as he aggressively stares at him.

“Quick on your feet, huh? You got me!” he sarcastically frowns, dropping his head down menacingly. “All my tricks are exposed…”

He rushes at Seth at full speed, slamming his right fist forward as Seth barely dodges off to the left, while Vain sends the punch straight into the wall that was behind his head, creating a large indent.

“...Not.”

Before Seth can regain his balance, Vain kicks the right of his abdomen and slams him against the wall on the opposite side, next to the damaged apartment’s door. Clutching his stomach and coughing out blood, Seth leans against the side of the wall as if he’d fall over if it wasn’t there. Inside, the mother is clutching to the child, holding his head, and trying to calm him down as she’s too scared to move her legs and escape. Vain steps toward Seth, each step becoming weightier to reflect his disappointment.

“Huh… you’re weaker than I thought you’d be. You are our Progenitor, yeah?”

Seth struggles to look up at Vain, let alone answer him, as his vision blurs and his ears are buzzing uncontrollably. He’s completely out of it.

Just then, the child begins crying while his mother desperately tries to quiet him down by holding him tightly. Vain’s eyes dart over to the doorway, slowly turning his head to face it.

“No…” Seth barely spits out, weakly grabbing at his ankle as he takes a single step toward the door. Vain looks down at him, barely acknowledging him as he smugly kicks his hand away.

After his death... I promised I wouldn’t kill another…
And that I would never… let anyone in front of me die again…

“Huh? Oh… I get it.” Vain says, hitting his left flat-faced palm with his right fist in a “eureka”-type fashion, showing Seth the wide grin he despises. “You’re holding yourself back because of those two…”

He drops the grin, walking toward the mother and child with a deadpan stare, very little emotion shown through his calmly psychopathic eyes.

Right now, he despises the two of them more than anything else in the world.

That if I could stop it... if I could protect someone…

Seth watches, helplessly fallen over onto his side, as Vain aggressively grips a large handful of hair belonging to the top of the mother’s scalp, dragging her on her knees from the middle of their living room toward the balcony further into the apartment as she lets go of her child.

“N-no…! Please! Please just let me go!” she begs, trying to release his grip on her hair. She attempts to grab onto the arm of the couch, then onto a fallen-over coffee table, but Vain doesn’t let up.

And yet… this man in front of me…

Seth painfully crawls forward while gritting his teeth, pushing his fingertips against the harsh wooden floor of the apartment, feeling every groove as a reminder of the futile distance he’s making with his body in the state it's in.

“Let… her... go…!” Seth barely manages to cough out the words as Vain continues to angrily pull the woman to the edge of the balcony, holding her by the back of her shirt as he quickly forces her head front first over the railing. The rain outside falls on both of them, drenching their clothes.

…Is going to murder someone… because I exist.

“NO! NOOO! STOP THIS! PLEASE!” she pleads, as Vain shows his signature disturbingly vile smug grin, holding her in place as she looks down at the sickeningly long distance to the ground in horror.

If I could… just kill him…

As the woman continues to scream in fear from having her head pushed down over the railing further and further, Vain looks over his right shoulder back at the kid, who’s staring at him in frozen horror.

“Do you know what angels are, little boy?” he asks, with a mocking smirk and a cocked eyebrow.

If I had... that ability...

The child slowly nods in response, tears quietly forming in the recesses of his eyes.

“Good…” Vain replies, grabbing the back of the boy’s mother’s shirt, and slowly lifting her upward and further over the railing.

Right now… In this moment, I...

“...When you grow up, blame this on a cruel God.”

Vain brings her up over the edge of the railing, throwing her off without an ounce of care. She stares at the ground, falling just as fast as the rain around her, knowing that she’s going to hit it. That she’s going to die. Her screams cause the making of Seth’s blood to curl, and his skin to shiver in a way he had almost forgotten it could. He could only stare at the back of the child’s head, unmoving as he slowly raised his hand up without moving his body, unable to deduct where his mother had disappeared to. Suddenly, her screams stopped.

Her body had hit the pavement.

Seth’s eyes were open wide, though he couldn’t feel anything belonging to his own body. The only thing he felt at that moment was a burning hellfire inside of him, as Vain’s actions doused the entirety of his soul in gasoline. It burned brighter than the sun, and then charred away, forming a hard black crust over it. Seth screamed in anguish as it happened as if he was going mad, while he slammed his forehead against the floor. The pain of his self-inflicted injury wasn’t felt, and the soreness of his vocal cords was lost to a feeling that was indescribably worse than any physical pain he had ever experienced.

…I would throw everything away.

Just to kill this man in front of me.

Anything. I would give anything.

This world is a cruel, disgusting place.

It doesn’t change. It just gets worse.

Humans are just…

Before he could finish that strain of thought, and before he ripped his vocal cords from his endless screaming, information he’d never heard nor known about before entered his mind like a snake slithering in through his ear and coiling around his brain. It caused an intense sharp pain which he winced at, but then it was over.

But it kept repeating, over, and over, and over, and over, and over again.

Somewhere in Seth’s mind, or his soul, he knew what it meant.

Why it was there.

It even felt familiar to him, somehow, as if he’d known it for his entire life.

Beginning to part his dry and bloody cracked lips, he scrapes his fingertips against the ground, pushing against the floor of the apartment with all of his strength as he grits his teeth so hard he feels as if he’ll shatter them. Vain stands on the balcony, staring wide-eyed with an excited expression. He had gotten what he wanted.

“I call to thee… O’ forsaken World Tree. Hear my words, and protect me…” Seth slowly begins to recite the words that had forced themselves into his mind through gritted teeth, with a scratchy and coarse, incredibly pained voice.

He looks up at Vain, dead in his eyes, force-feeding all of the hatred and anger he feels for him in that moment directly into his soul. It causes Vain to open his eyes even wider, smiling even harder as his fingers tense up and erratically convulse, which pisses Seth off even more.

“...For time is a game, and it deserves to be played.”

As soon as Seth had finished uttering the last word, wind began to swirl around his feet, knocking loose objects around in the apartment. The little boy quickly backed away, hiding near a corner.

The wind rose both in height and intensity, as it covered Seth’s entire body while an aqua-green light started to emanate from it. Vain still stood on the balcony, watching in awe and excitement.

He couldn’t see the sharp, jutted spines that looked like broken pieces of light, greyish-teal metal as they tore themselves from the flesh above Seth’s spine. There was no blood, though Seth’s nerves fired off as his brain was convinced it had experienced brutal pains.

Large bio-organic plates of armor that seemed like a mix of scales, bones, and flesh, made their way across Seth’s back, up his arms, and down his legs, snapping together and securing themselves around his limbs as they extended, with additional plates being revealed under their previous counterparts.

The shape of his silhouette had begun to shift into something much more monstrous, as the plates shifted past his legs, extending what were functionally his limbs. The same had continued with his arms, expanding them as they were encased by the living armor that covered them.

The plates of armor continued to cover his torso, as a large breastplate connected itself that came from his shoulders. Its color was a darker grey compared to the rest of the body as if it belonged to the underside of a reptile. Those spines had continued to jut out of Seth’s back as this transformation had taken place, crowding themselves around his spine.

Seth had closed his eyes before the transformation began, accepting whatever was happening to him. After the spines stopped appearing, a split jaw containing the bottom row of teeth that looked more like broken iron spikes than bone, attached together in front of Seth’s mouth as layered neck scales began to slide down from the gaps on the bottom, attaching themselves to the shoulder and chest plates. Finally, a rounded but similarly armored head and top set of teeth, with four sets of closed eyes symmetrically placed across the face, and an embedded hourglass inside of his forehead with its own respective “socket”, clasped down on top of the bottom set of teeth with a loud, almost mechanic sounding chomp.

The light began to dissipate first, as Vain received his first proper look at what had become Seth’s silhouette.

It was around half a meter taller than Seth, with monstrous proportions.

His fingers had toes had grown razor-sharp, bony claws at the end of each of them.

The arms and legs appeared muscular, but sharp.

Sharp bones were jutting outwards from both the elbows and knees, appearing as if they were blades.

The jagged spines near the back looked like a row of bent knives had stabbed their way out of the thing’s back.

All of this was accompanied by a lined, ominous aqua-green glow that coiled itself around the entire body, inside of the indentations between where the plates connected.
As the wind that covered its body disappeared, the thing that Seth had become began to open its eyes, each of them appearing animalistic with black slits for pupils. They looked around, independently of one another, as they searched the apartment for Vain.

They found him within a second’s worth of time, their pupils expanding as they came into contact with his face.

“You…” A raspy, distorted, and growling voice came from behind the teeth.