Chapter 53: Memories lll
That was until it happened.
The scene shifted.
All three of them watched it unfold in front of them, the white space of the mindscape replaced by something else entirely, images surfacing like memories rising through deep water.
Leon had always been good at fighting.
Not trained good, not coached and refined and polished good. Naturally good, the kind that comes from somewhere that instruction can’t reach. Combat felt like a language he’d been born already knowing. His body understood angles and timing and weight distribution before his mind had words for any of it.
That was why Mira parents assigned him as her guardian.
Even without that he vowed to protect her, to be with her, afterall she was the only light that shined for him,
He’d made the decision privately, much earlier than they’d asked.
She was the only light he had. The only constant. Everything else in his life up to her doorstep had been cold in one way or another.
He would protect her. Simple as that. No negotiation required, not with himself, not with anyone.
And on Earth, Leon was the only person who could use ki.
That had drawn attention eventually. It always does.
Eventually, an organization approached him, they called themselves Obsidian, housing military strengths that scales to more than a country, from the way they approached him, it was for obvious reasons, very ambitious individuals, they were planning on world domination. Even without that Leon would have never agreed, afterall, his strength was to protect Mira and Mira alone, nothing else, so he declined.
...
Leon had never been much for school.
Mira had tried convincing him more than once. He’d listened politely and continued not enrolling. There was still a year before it became unavoidable, and he intended to make full use of that year.
He was only there to drop some things off.
He noticed it before he reached the gate.
The silence.
A high school housing hundreds of students on a regular Tuesday morning had a sound to it. A specific, layered, unmistakable sound of that many people existing in one place. Voices, footsteps, something dropped somewhere, someone laughing too loud in a corridor.
There was none of that.
Leon slowed.
Walked through the gate.
The courtyard was wrong in a way that registered in his body before his mind had finished processing it. He looked at the ground first.
Blood.
Not a little. The kind that tells you something has already happened and happened badly. Smeared across the concrete in patterns that meant people had been moved, or had moved themselves, or had stopped moving entirely.
A student lay near the entrance to the main building.
Not unconscious.
Leon’s chest did something he didn’t have a word for.
He kept walking.
More inside. The hallway. The stairwell. The particular stillness of a building that should have been loud and wasn’t because the people who made the noise were gone or worse.
His mind had locked onto one thing.
Mira.
Where is she.
Then the gunshot.
One, sharp and close, from somewhere in the building above him.
Then another.
The sound hit him somewhere that had nothing to do with his ears. He was already moving before it finished echoing, taking the stairs, following the direction of it, his hands steady in the way his hands always were and his chest anything but.
Where is she. Where is she.
He found the central hall.
The doors were closed but the sounds coming through them weren’t.
He pushed them open.
Hundreds of students. Seated on the floor in rough clusters, heads down, some shaking, some past shaking. Armed men positioned at every exit, faces covered, weapons out. Three students near the front that weren’t sitting anymore.
Leon stood in the doorway and took it all in in the span of two seconds.
Terrorists.
They’d taken the whole school. Gathered everyone here, picked some off already as demonstration, as control, as whatever point required dead children to make.
His eyes moved across the room.
Looking for one face.
He found her.
Center of the hall.
There was a hole in her chest.
Her dark hair was ruffled and her eyes were loosing their light.
She was still alive. Still screaming, the sound of it cutting through everything else in the room, her classmates frozen around her with the particular paralysis of people who understood that moving would make things worse and not moving was killing them from the inside.
Nobody could do anything.
And Leon—
His world torn apart.
He was supposed to protect her, he had it, the power to protect her, yet...
Yet he couldn’t move, was it shock? Anger?
She saw him in the doorway.
Even then. Even with that hole in her chest and the blood spreading beneath her and the pain that should have taken everything, she saw him and her face did something.
Relief.
And underneath it, something urgent. Something that looked like don’t, or run, or both at once.
Then she fell.
The sound her body made hitting the floor was very small.
Leon looked at her.
Looked at her face, still, the expression frozen somewhere between the relief and the urgency, caught between the two forever now.
Why did this have to happen, he as all he had, yet this world took her away from him, he had never felt so helpless.
Something moved in him.
Deep. Below thought. Below memory. Below anything that had a name or a shape or a boundary.
Something that had been sleeping for a very long time opened its eyes.
Outside, the sky went dark. Not gradually. Just dark, the clouds rolling in from every direction simultaneously, the wind picking up into something violent that rattled every window in the building and tore leaves from trees three streets over.
The ground shook.
Leon’s eyes, black since the day he’d arrived on this planet, shifted.
Amethyst.
Glowing.
Then, his aura detonated.
Purple, deep and absolute, surging outward from him in a wave that knocked every armed man in the hall off his feet before any of them had processed what was happening. It climbed the walls, cracked the ceiling, blew the doors off their frames.
He didn’t feel it happening.
He didn’t feel anything except the thing that had replaced everything else, the thing with no name that lived in the space where Mira used to be.
A roar ripped out of him.
And on that day.
The world burned.
