Chapter 11: Ch51. The approaching storm (3)
It caught me off guard.
Was I really seeing it? Seeing ’him’?
"What? Cat got your tongue?" He looked at me.
But there was something off about him. Off, but at the same time so familiar that it gave me goosebumps.
He still looked taller and stronger than me, but it wasn’t just that.
His eyes glowed in a dark tone of red and he gave off an ominous mana vibration.
The glow in his eyes felt more familiar now, for some reason. And I remembered where I’d seen it before.
It was the same color of the crystal I stole from father.
And it made me remember what Evellyn told me, about how Octavius found a use for the fragments of the meteor that originated the Calamity.
"I killed you. How are you here?"
But he wasn’t there when I finished the question.
My senses went crazy as I felt him appearing suddenly behind me and striking a punch at the back of my head, but I was able to dodge the hit by a hairsbreadth.
"Funny how you seem to have become stronger than before." Quintus’ voice was cold and didn’t feel like his real voice.
In fact, he himself didn’t feel like Quintus, but then I turned to face him.
His face looked like distorting for a brief second, and his eyes glowed more intensely.
"Who are you?" I was serious on this. He couldn’t be Quintus right? After all, I killed him. "You’re not Quintus, so tell me who you are."
He gave a few steps in my direction.
"Oh, but I am Quintus." He smiled wide as he stared at me. But no, that smile was more of a grin than a smile, because it didn’t seem to have any happiness in it. "Only that I am... A little bit..."
He vanished from my sight again, and less than a second later, I heard his voice right behind me.
But this time, my senses didn’t warn me about him.
"Different." And I saw the clean hit to my head in the shape of a thousand stars as my body was sent flying towards a wall. "Can’t you tell why?"
I could barely evade the impact against the wall, but my body was stronger, so my arms and legs were able to absorb it, and I fell to the floor, panting.
Why was he different?
Why was he so familiar and so different?
And why my senses didn’t warn me about the attack from before?
Quintus looked at me from where he stood, his brow raised and his arms crossed.
"Well, well, since you’re not the sharpest tool of the shed, I’ll give you a hint then." He opened his hand showing his palm in my direction, and what I saw there made sense with everything.
"Father used you in his experiments..." I said while looking at the red fragment in the palm of Quintus’ hand.
"Oh, no. This time it wasn’t him." He laughed. "Funny thing, what becoming a part of something greater can help you achieve... Now I even became deathless!"
[PRYING EYES]
I couldn’t wait any longer. And soon, Quintus’ profile window was displayed in front of me.
[NAME: QUINTUS BLAKE
LVL: ???
AGE: 25
CLASS: Inhuman
STAMINA: ???/???
HP: ???/???
MP: ???/???
BASIC STATS
Strength: ???
Dexterity: ???
Agility: ???
Perception: ???
Intelligence: ???
Vigor: ???]
Whatever was happening to him, whatever process he had gotten through, Quintus was definitely not human anymore, that much the system was able to show me.
But what the fuck was that with all the question marks? And the more I scrolled, the more question marks appeared.
It was as if all of his stats, skills and levels were unknown.
"What? Are you so surprised that you even forgot how to speak?"
Yes, I couldn’t understand what was going on, and when I was about to say something, I finally felt something.
Nikolai and his father coming out from downstairs, straight in our direction, and I knew what was going to happen if Nikolai showed up in front of him again.
I tried focusing my senses to get to understand where exactly Nikolai was, because Yuri’s presence sort of overshadowed his, since my friend was only a regular.
But even before I could reach him with my senses, Quintus was in front of me again.
And once more, I couldn’t sense his approaching.
"Do you really think you will be able to save your regular friend just because you can sense him?" He grabbed my cheeks, looking dead into my eyes. "Let me tell you one thing. You won’t be able to save him, just as much as you won’t be able to save your other regular little friends at school."
His words made me feel like I was waking up from a pleasant dream with a bucket of ice cold water thrown down my head.
So that was what the New Dawn guild was planning!? They intended to make people believe that the Association saved the school from a Nest opening, so that the people could send their children back to school as if nothing happened!
FUCK!
Quintus’ grip was as solid as steel this time, like he could overpower my strength as if it was nothing, so I tried leaning back against the wall and summoning [MIDNIGHT SISTERS].
At the moment that one of them appeared in my hand and I cut Quintus’ arm by his wrist, I heard the beep that preceded one of the system’s messages, along with Quintus’ large grin.
[THE SYSTEM IS CURRENTLY IN CONFLICT DUE TO PROXIMITY WITH A SIMILAR EXISTENCE]
Similar existence?
"You think you can stop me by cutting off my limbs?" He smirked as his fist approached me at full speed.
[SHADOW WALK]
I evaded the punch, vanishing from his sight with my skill, and less than a split-second later, feeling the heat of his fist grazing the side of my head, I heard the concrete of the wall crumbling down...
At the same moment when Nikolai and Yuri appeared from the door on the other side of the courtyard.
