Chapter 12 — Power Awakens

  William shot up to his feet as the black mass silently descended from the ceiling above. The computer lab that felt like a safe sanctuary now seemed like a prison, the walls more enclosing than ever, the windows sealed off just like his fate. There was nowhere left to run. And even if he ran, what about Finn? Scratch that. What a stupid thought. Now was not the time to worry about Finn, when both of them were about to die.

  The monster stepped into the blinking blue lights of the work stations. The creature’s grotesque form was illuminated in horrifying detail. Mottled skin glistened wetly under the blinking blue glow. It observed him closely, revealing its hound-like head and elongated jaw with saliva dripping from it as it sniffed one of the computer monitors.

  There was something ragged in its mouth, and as it walked past a desktop, the object loomed into sight. A human arm, severed just below the elbow, dangled in its mouth. The sides had been gnawed cleaned, red flesh ripped from bone, the skin mangled and covered in blood and other bodily fluids. No once did William ever wonder what the inside of a human body looked like, and now that he’d seen it, he could not recall encountering anything more disgusting in his entire life. Bile built up at the back of his throat, but he swallowed, resisting the urge to expel his dinner.

  As he faced certain death like a cornered animal, all of his options extinguished, his mind raced to what were now irrelevant topics. Only now did he finally realize why he so desperately wanted to touch Ebenezer’s dead body. It was to confirm the body’s temperature, because the janitor’s closet was hot, so hot that Vanessa complained about it. If the body was still cold in such a hot environment, then it meant that Ebenezer must have been dragged over there through the vents in stability storage.

  The monster stood over Finn, sniffing his shoulder as he snored, so mercifully ignorant of the current situation.

  Coming to his senses from a hypnotic daze, William grabbed a metal stool to defend himself with, then produced his phone out of his pocket, shakily turning on the phone screen to maximum brightness. The white light beamed from his phone towards the skulk, who appeared to wince slightly at the light. Its skin convulsed and its body seemed to contract, and it let out a low rumbling growl—the first sound he’d heard it make.

  “Back off!” he shouted.

  The skulk shifted its immense bulk and darted behind a row of monitors, knocking over a keyboard as it did so. It seemed to be averse to the light. Strangely, the blinking blue lights from the computers did not bother it in the same way, but something about his phone’s screen made it irritated. As long as he could keep the light shining onto it, he could keep it disoriented, or at least he hoped.

  Unfortunately, the creature learned quickly. Knocking over an entire row of tables, it advanced on him by pushing the row of tables towards him, dragging along with it all the cables and crashed monitors as it used all the excess equipment as cover. Its movements were no longer as calculated as before, no longer trying to cover its tracks as meticulously.

  The light! He needed to maintain a direct connection between the beam of light and its body. Since it was using ground level cover, he needed elevation to retain line of sight onto it. William scrambled and climbed onto a table, knocking over a monitor as he held out his phone at where the skulk had been just a moment ago—but the spot behind the debris was empty. It had moved.

  Where did it go? William spun around, looking behind him, when the impact came from the side. He fell from the table, landing heavily onto the ground, his head bouncing off the hard floor painfully as the metal stool clanked to the ground nearby. With his ears ringing, he felt the monster’s front limbs pressing him down with a weight that felt like an entire refrigerator had fallen on top of him. He couldn’t breath, couldn’t even lift his chest up to take a single breath of air, as the monster’s jaw descended onto his neck.

  Time felt like it was going in slow motion, but he knew it was an illusion. He was defenseless and optionless. All he had left was his phone, which hung limp in his left hand, that old piece of junk he never had the heart to throw away because he’d grown so attached to it. It was all he ever had since the beginning, when he picked it up out of a dumpster after he left the orphanage. Now, almost a decade later, it had somehow followed him till the end of his life.

  In a sense, it was a physical representation of his loneliness. He never had a mom to cook him a nice meal when he came back from school, never had a dad to bring him to the arcade or teach him how to ride a bike. He never had a birthday party or even a birthday cake, never had a friend to play hide and seek with—that was a game he only heard about in books. He never knew what it meant for someone to love him.

  The only warmth he ever looked forward to when coming back from school was his phone, where he could read—and most importantly, where he could forget the things he no longer wished to remember. The years were not kind to him.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  A tear rolled down William’s cheek. How uncharacteristic, he thought to himself, that at the very end, he would turn sentimental. For once he felt envious of Finn. To die in his sleep, obvious to it all… that didn’t sound too bad now.

  He blinked, suddenly coming back to reality. Time had not stopped at all. Why was he still alive? His eyes trailed to the left, his head too tired to even move. A monitor had fallen onto the ground before he himself fell, and that monitor just happened to be propping up his left hand. A dazzling beam of white light emanated from his phone. Somehow, it seemed brighter than usual.

  The beam of light crossed over above his body like the sword of an angel, and the skulk appeared to be injured on the side of its jaw, as if the light had burned it when it tried to cross. The monster had reared its head warily, as a tendril of black mist floated out of its jaws.

  But the light coming from the phone screen intensified, as if it was calling to him. For some reason, he felt like the source of the light no longer came from the phone’s battery, but rather something entirely different… it came from himself. It was almost as if he was… awakening a power?

  How could he have forgotten the criteria for awakening! Close contact with otherworld energy was the trigger for power manifestation. These days, that meant waiting for a turn to touch the awakening orb, which was just an orb retrieved from the other side with a high concentration of otherworld energy, but back in the day, the first awakeners discovered their powers when in contact with an organic concentration of otherworld energy. For instance, a particularly powerful monster…

  William’s eyes shot open. He knew what to do—to just follow his instincts. Reaching over with his right hand, he reached towards his phone screen. The phone was now burning hot on his left hand, and his right hand now burned as well, but he paid no attention to that. He reached into the light, grasping it, the pain immense and building as the light began to take a physical form. The pain was unbearable, the pressure and heat feeling like it would melt right through to his bone! But he grit his teeth and pressed on.

  And then he drew it. A shard of light—brilliant, shining, scalding white light—remained in his hand like a dagger. It was the length of a textbook, and shaped almost like a thick toothpick. The skulk reeled. It had been trying to separate the phone from William while breathing out that black mist, but now it backed up in fear.

  William held his breath, careful not to inhale any of the black mist, as he rose to his feet. The sensation of mana coursing through his body was quite foreign, and yet he’d read so much about it in preparation for this day. It felt like a liquid that sloshed around in his body, but also like life force itself, weakening him and draining him ever so slowly.

  But that did not matter at this moment. The skulk mounted onto a printer, then lunged at him. As the monster streaked through the dark computer lab, its beast-like jaw extending once again in that horribly alien fashion, William drew back his right arm as muscle memory kicked in, then threw the shard of light like he’d done so many times in the past, playing with pebbles in the alleyway by himself.

  His aim was true. Even though the skulk was a moving target, the light shard pierced into its shoulder with a terrible hiss, causing the skulk to let out a multi-pitched groan of pain. It rocked back and forth, attempting to remove the light from its shoulder, but every time it touched the shard of light it jerked back in pain as a hiss issued from the contact point, like a piece of meat dropped onto a hot pan.

  William reached towards his phone’s light once again, trying to draw another shard, but found that he wasn’t able to. He already had to count himself lucky. Lower ranked powers were barely able to scratch higher tier beasts, and he had somehow managed to manifest a weapon strong enough to injure an unclassified beast. That by itself was already a miracle.

  Not only that, but the fragment of light persisted despite being disconnected from him for so long already. That too could only be described as a miracle. How could such a power exist? Where would it fall under the traditional grading scale? Again, irrelevant concerns pestered his mind in such a perilous situation. All he needed to know was that he could hurt this unclassified monster.

  The skulk attempted to lunge at him again, but William dodged to the side. He felt his face starting to turn red from holding his breath. He couldn’t keep this up much longer. Taking his phone, he shone the light at the skulk again, causing it to writhe in pain. The shard of light continued to hiss as the skulk writhed, no doubt burning any new flesh that came into contact with it.

  Finally, the monster seemed to have decided that it had enough. It backed away, grabbing the severed arm before leaping up into the ceiling tile, with the fragment of light still embedded within it. William chased it, feeling somehow emboldened by his newfound powers, but he too was at his limit. He took a breath, panting, and felt the mana drain becoming too much to sustain the phone light any longer.

  As the ceiling tile closed once again, William limped towards Finn until he could no longer muster the energy to move anymore. He collapsed to the ground, the light dimming from his phone until it returned to battery power once more.

  The last thing he could remember was a blinking blue light.

  —

  He woke up, startled. Instead of the cold, hard floor of the computer lab, he now felt a small pillow underneath his head.

  A beep issued from the vital signs monitor to the right of him.

  “Nurse,” called someone’s voice. “Patient 104 is awake!”