Chapter 116 Little Girl [Witch]

Twenty years later, I wasn’t getting any younger. My bones creaked like rusted hinges whenever I moved, and the wrinkles that had once been lines of experience had deepened into canyons of exhaustion. I was old then, and I was still old now… somehow alive, if you could call this living.

The world had changed around me, but he hadn’t.

It had started with a single night, the one that turned us from fugitives into rulers. We conquered a city without firing a shot, without even alerting anyone. It was… methodical, clinical, and perfect in ways only he could make possible.

Light had begun by blacking out the entire city grid. Every generator, every emergency system, and every powered circuit went silent all at once. His lightning didn’t just destroy. Instead, it rewrote. He reached into the current itself, bending it to his will. The city plunged into an absolute, electric void.

And then he paralyzed them.

It was neither sleep nor unconsciousness. Instead, it was a complete interruption of motor function. They were awake inside their minds, trapped in their still bodies, while I entered. One by one.

With every mind I touched, my consciousness expanded, a lattice of thought stretching across thousands of people. My Telepathy-12 sang at full strength, threads of myself binding the entire city into a single, silent network. I could feel their heartbeats, their dreams, and their buried fears. When the blackout ended, they rose in unison… obedient, docile, whole… mine.

As for the local capes, they tried to resist. They always did. Light broke their resistance the way one might break a glowstick: with a single, casual snap. I went into their minds afterward, scraping away pride, rewriting loyalty, and softening edges until all that remained were tools that believed in him.

While I could not ‘mind-control’ them in the truest sense of the word, I could still edit their personalities. It was an ability that Light took great value in me. So, even with the touch of my powers, capes still opposed us. However, Light’s persuasion through violence had never been more convincing. I once saw him reduce a man’s nervous system to light and rebuild it just to prove a point. That kind of fear reshapes people.

From ten, we were reduced to seven. Some of us tried to outthink him, to exploit weakness, and to run. They didn’t get far.

Light wasn’t superhuman in the way that mattered. He could turn into lightning of pure energy and pass through walls, storms, or even the void of space without being touched. His mind operated faster than ours could process; he could think in superluminal bursts, analyze a battlefield before we even realized there was one. And his body… it wasn’t just powerful… it was impossible. The laws that governed us simply bent around him.

Yet, for all that godhood, he still carried that unbearable messiah-complex. He preached salvation through dominion, talking about “purging the rot,” “building a new world,” “creating an ideal order of heroes.” It might have sounded noble if not for the corpses and the silence that followed him wherever he went.

We were no longer prisoners of the SRC. We were prisoners of him. A different cage, forged by faith and fear.

The others thought I understood him because I could read his mind. I let them believe that. The truth was more complicated and far more terrifying. I could touch the surface of his thoughts, sometimes glimpse flashes of what lay beneath… but even then, it was like staring into the sun. Too bright. Too vast. His mind wasn’t built for human comprehension.

Sometimes, though, when he was quiet… when the lightning dimmed and the mania faded… I thought I could feel something like sorrow radiating from him. Or maybe it was just static pretending to be emotion.

I stood on the balcony of the small house I’d chosen from the endless rows of abandoned homes, gazing at the city below. It had been years since anyone dared call it by its old name. Now it was just The Beacon… his domain. My mind rippled through the millions sleeping beneath us, connected to each one like neurons in a living city.

My power had never been stronger, nor had my chains.

“Hey there, Witch.”

His voice came from behind me, soft, familiar, and charged. I turned slowly, my joints protesting the motion. He was standing in the doorway, casual as ever, framed by dim light. Lightning hummed faintly under his skin, tracing patterns that pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat.

In his arms, he held a child.

A little girl who couldn’t have been older than six. Pale. Barefoot. Eyes wide and uncomprehending.

“Can you help me with this one?” he asked.

I frowned, the weight of exhaustion sinking deeper into me. “What are you planning, Light?”

“Nothing complicated,” he said softly. “Just… a test. More like a need, really…”

He stepped closer, extending the child toward me. The static around him made the hair on my arms rise.

“Transfer your consciousness,” he said. “Into her.”

The child’s mind was… empty. Not quiet, but absent. It was like a house stripped bare of furniture and memory, the walls still standing but hollow inside. I reached deeper, expecting resistance, a flicker of thought, a whisper of identity, but there was nothing.

I frowned. “What did you do?”

Light tilted his head, as if the question itself amused him. He was still cradling the girl in his arms, her limp form swaying slightly in the dim light. “Hmmm? I took away her mind,” he said, grinning with that eerie, boyish delight that never fit the scale of his power. “Isn’t she cute?”

Cute. He used the word as if he were describing a toy, not a child whose consciousness had been erased.

“Who is this girl?” I asked, my tone more brittle than I’d intended.

He blinked, then smiled wider, eyes bright with manic certainty. “She’s my grandmother, of course!”

For a long moment, I said nothing. I just stared. His expression was too genuine to be mockery, too casual to be a lie. “What are you talking about?” I finally managed.

“It’s like this over and over again, you know?” he said, setting the girl gently down on the couch. He crouched beside her, brushing a lock of hair from her face. “People don’t believe me when I say I came from the future. It’s not their fault, I suppose. The idea frightens them. It’s easier to call me delusional.”

His tone softened, strange with melancholy. “This just feels sad, you know?”

I stared at him and I knew, with that deep, unnerving certainty that telepaths sometimes get, that he wasn’t lying. His words rang true, vibrating in the air like the aftershock of lightning. It baffled me. The idea that someone could travel through time, through the noise of all possible realities, and this was what arrived… a god in human form, unstable, brilliant, and terrifying. Was the future truly so desperate, so hopeless, that they had to send back a creature like him?

No. I couldn’t imagine a sane civilization choosing this.

Superpowered psychosis was a common enough affliction among the gifted. Too much power bends the mind inward, collapsing empathy beneath the weight of possibility. But this wasn’t psychosis. This was something far worse. This was the death of the ‘human’ altogether.

I could see it in the way Light looked at his so-called grandmother, not with affection or nostalgia, but with cold calculation. To him, she wasn’t family. She was a vector, a fixed point in a cosmic equation. A tool to ensure his existence remained inevitable.

I didn’t understand the science behind it… paradox mechanics, temporal anchors, bloodline correction… but I wasn’t daft. He was ensuring the past wouldn’t deviate. That his life would always come to be. That he would always be born.

Still… wasn’t what he was doing now the equivalent of handing me his kill switch? Giving me the one thing tethered to his origin, the one mind whose erasure might unravel him?

He either didn’t realize it, or worse… he didn’t care.

So, I did as I was told.

I reached into the child’s vacant consciousness, and for the first time in years, I hesitated. There was nothing to copy over, no identity to overwrite. It was like sculpting from air. I slid into the void, anchoring my mind inside the hollow vessel. For a moment, my senses doubled… my old, decaying self and this small, fragile body coexisting in parallel. It was an unsettling echo, a second heartbeat beside my own.

When I opened my eyes, the girl’s eyes, Light was already leaning closer, smiling like a proud parent. He wrapped his arms around me, around her, and pulled me close. The static made my skin prickle. His voice was soft, almost tender.

“Hey,” he murmured, “now we’re family.”

He laughed, a sound full of impossible cheer. “So, my little grandma… what do you want to eat for lunch?”

I didn’t mind, not really. I’d learned long ago that playing along kept you alive.

“Burger and fries,” said the little girl in the small, uncertain voice that now came out of my mouth. “Also, ice cream?”

“Yeah, yeah… Anything you want…”

The banality of it all was not beneath me. I was a super-villain, and I did bad things. I’d done worse. The minds I gathered through my telepathy had once been my trophies, then my toys. Back then, I even called them dolls, little people I could move around and watch when I got bored.

Even now, I felt the same, though age had taught me to dress it up with fancier words. I let them live their own lives so I could feel it with them: their hopes, their hungers, and their stupid little dramas. Sometimes I’d make a pair fall too hard for each other just to remember what that rush felt like. Sometimes I’d push someone over the edge just to feel their fear when they fell.

There were no lows for me, only different flavors of thrill. Sin, cruelty, and curiosity all blurred together until it was just noise to fill the silence in my head. So I didn’t think too much about it. I just smiled and played along with Light.

So, when Light smiled at me so charmingly, I smiled back.

“Thank you for your services,” he said softly. “It would be awkward if this version of you were still around, so… bye-bye.”

And then he killed me.

A single spark, and the world went white. Pain bloomed, a sharp, clean brightness that erased everything. I felt my body convulse, felt the air tear from my lungs, and then… nothing.

But he wasn’t finished.

Even as my consciousness fragmented, I felt myself dying again and again, the shock rippling through every mind I still inhabited. The link between us, the citywide web I’d built, became a conduit for execution. His lightning raced through it, burning away each connection, each version of me.

I stumbled toward the window, the girl’s small body trembling. Outside, the world convulsed in chaos. Vehicles collided in blinding sparks, lights exploded in the streets, and the people, my people, collapsed mid-step. Their deaths echoed through me like a chorus of collapsing thoughts.

It was a slaughter.

“What are you doing!?” I screamed, pressing my tiny hands against the glass. “Please, stop! It hurts too much!”

My plea sounded high-pitched and frightened. I hadn’t heard myself cry in decades.

Light turned toward me, calm, radiant, and terrible. “No, no,” he said with a soft laugh. “This must happen, you know? It would be awkward if there were too many yous. I just need one grandma.”

“You’re insane,” I whispered.

He tilted his head, eyes glowing blue. “We all are, don’t you know that?” His smile widened, almost tender. “Besides, this way, you won’t be able to run from me. We can’t have that, can we? I need you for my all-star superhero team.”

He said it like a joke, but I could feel the conviction under the madness. The truth of it burned brighter than the lightning crawling across his skin. As I looked up at him, trembling in the little girl’s body, I finally felt the unfamiliar weight of small limbs, the confusion, and the helplessness.

I looked down at my small, shaking hands and almost laughed.

So this was what I’d become, an old parasite stuffed into a child’s shell. I used to play people like instruments, make them dance, and make them ruin themselves just to feel something again. It had been my kind of entertainment. They called it evil; I called it keeping busy.

Now? I couldn’t even reach the table without a chair. The mighty Witch, breaker of minds, was brought low by her own little god and her own bad habits.

Of course, I tried to fight back with my telepathy, but it was futile. My mind brushed against his like a moth against a storm.

“That’s ticklish, you know?” Light said, smiling.

Then came the pain. My body convulsed, nerves on fire, every thought collapsing into white noise. I fell face-first to the floor, the taste of metal flooding my mouth. It hurt more than dying, more than living. The electricity didn’t just burn; it hollowed.

Outside, the rest of Beacon screamed. Through my telepathic web, I felt thousands of minds blink out, like candles snuffed in sequence. The surviving members of Project Tenfold were tearing through the remnants of the city, cutting down any cape or soldier who dared resist. Those he deemed “unfit” were erased without hesitation.

The days that followed were a slow unraveling of reason. Light experimented on the city’s survivors, both capes and mundanes, driven by some fevered conviction that suffering could force the emergence of new powers. He called it ‘pulling potential’. I called it madness.

He would gather his subjects in what had once been the city square and begin his “tests.” I was forced to watch, my link to every trembling mind keeping me tethered to their pain. It was like drowning in other people’s nightmares. I had thought myself depraved once, playing with lives for amusement, but Light showed me how shallow my cruelty really was. I only borrowed misery. He manufactured it.

“It has to happen,” he told me once, voice almost tender as the air hummed with residual charge. “Trust me, Witch. We need the strongest capes on our roster, you know?”

I said nothing. There was nothing left worth saying.

Days bled into weeks until the city was nothing but smoke and silence. When his experiments were done, when Beacon could offer him no more, he decided it was time to erase the evidence.

We, the remnants, stood beyond the outskirts as he ascended into the sky, his body dissolving into a column of blinding light. The ground trembled. The air itself warped. In seconds, Beacon was gone and scoured from existence by brilliance too cruel to be holy.

When the light faded, he descended, naked and unburned, electricity crawling lazily across his skin. His eyes glowed like twin suns.

“Now,” he said, stretching as if after a pleasant nap, “that took a lot out of me. But thankfully, I have you…”

He turned toward one of us, a young cape whose gift was electricity generation. The man barely had time to react before Light reached for him. There was a flash, a sound like the sky inhaling, and then only dust.

Light exhaled with pleasure. “My, my… that felt good. Wait—one, two, three…” He counted us like inventory. “Ah, only nine of you now. That really ruins the aesthetic.”

He paused, tapping his chin as sparks danced across his fingers. “I suppose I’ll have to join you. A team of ten has such a nice symmetry, don’t you think?”

He grinned. “Hmmm… I’ll need a name. How about… Lightning? No, that’s dull. Let’s see… Ning! Yes. Ning Light. Has a certain flair, doesn’t it?”

No one answered.

From then on, that was what the world knew us as… the Ten. Somehow, through his strange humor or his need for irony, he painted me as our figurehead.