Chapter 130 Where We Started

I walked out of the Tenfold Keep with my boots crunching against the shattered marble, the scent of scorched metal and ozone still hanging thick in the air. My hand was wrapped in Mrs. Mind’s tangled hair, dragging her across the debris-strewn floor like a trophy I didn’t want. Her dress was in tatters, singed from John’s telekinetic bursts. Her psychic field had flickered out like a dying bulb the moment we cornered her.

She whimpered, voice ragged and raw. “Please… please, Eclipse, you don’t have to do this. I can still help you. I can—”

I stopped, turning just enough to glare down at her. “Help me? You’ve been playing both sides since the start. Karma’s a bitch, Mrs. Mind. You just forgot it bites back.”

She twisted weakly, clutching at my wrist. “You think this is justice? Look at you! You’ve become a thug for the SRC… an errand boy for bureaucrats and hypocrites! You had power, riches, and freedom! You threw it all away to side with them!”

I pulled harder, forcing her to stumble forward. “Power isn’t freedom. It’s a leash with a prettier collar. And I got sick of being the one wearing it.”

Her laughter cracked like broken glass. “You pity me?”

“Yeah,” I said flatly. “Because you don’t even realize how small you are. You talk about power like it’s the only language that matters… but you’ve never learned to shut up and bleed quietly.”

She spat blood at my boots, and I didn’t flinch. John followed behind me, silent, his face unreadable as always. He didn’t need to say it, but I knew what he was thinking… the SRC didn’t expect us to make it out of this fight. We were expendable pieces on a board someone else owned. And when the dust settled, they’d come collecting debts in their polished suits and neutral smiles.

I smirked bitterly. “They’ll probably chew your head off for this, John.”

He shrugged, eyes glowing faintly blue. “Wouldn’t be the first time. Wouldn’t be the last.”

That was the thing about people like us. They called us villains when it was convenient, heroes when it made them feel safer. In truth, we were neither. I’d long since realized that. Being a bad guy wasn’t about cackling on rooftops or blowing up cities… it was about doing what needed to be done when everyone else pretended their hands were clean.

When we reached the shattered glass doors, I stopped. Wind tore through the gaping hole where the lobby used to be. Outside, the ground was scorched black. Missive… or rather Mother… was dragging herself upright from a crater, her body half-charred, bones knitting themselves together in eerie synchronization.

The sky cracked open.

A blinding streak of white-blue lightning tore downward, the sound splitting the air apart. The flash struck Mother square on her shoulder, slamming her into the ground. She screamed once before the sound was drowned out by the crackle of electricity.

When the light dimmed, he was there.

Light.

The man himself, stepping out of the storm like he’d been born from it, his body humming, arcs of voltage crawling up his arms. His eyes blazed with the same furious glow that had haunted too many nightmares lately.

He pressed a boot against Mother’s shoulder, pinning her to the dirt. Smoke rose where his foot met her flesh.

I raised my gun automatically, though I knew it wouldn’t matter. He looked up, meeting my eyes.

His expression was… almost calm. Almost.

“Looks like,” he said, voice cutting through the static, “we’ve returned to where we started, Eclipse.”

I had expected begging. I had expected bargains. I had not expected the little, brittle voice that trembled out from under Light’s boot to sound like a confession.

“T—this is it, Nick…” Mother rasped, each word a broken breath. “If you want to win, then you can only let go—”

Light drove his heel down harder across her back. Sparks licked up from his skin where electricity wanted out. “Shut it,” he snarled. “Or do you want to die? This is what’s going to happen… You will not share your precognition with Eclipse anymore—”

He meant to terrify her into compliance; instead, he lectured me. I felt the hot ribbon of anger curl inside me, with no patience left for lectures or threats.

The movement was stupidly simple. I stepped forward, wrapped my fingers around the slack at the back of Mrs. Mind’s neck, and folded. Bone met bone with a single, clean crunch. Her arms spasmed once. The sound cut Light off mid-sentence.

For a second, there was nothing but the brittle rattle of her breath and the faint smell of iron. Light’s face exploded from fury to a raw, animal disbelief as he spun toward me.

“Are you fucking insane!?” he bellowed.

I didn’t hesitate. I tightened my grip, just to make sure the point landed. “Kill her, then,” I said. My voice felt dry and small in the dust-choked air. “I don’t give a fuck.”

You could call it cruelty. You could call it cowardice. For me, it read like arithmetic: eliminate a variable that kept getting in the way. If Mrs. Mind lived, she’d keep sharing in the precognition, allowing Light to bargain and reroute the ledger until whatever plan meant survival was ground to a stump.

This was the endgame, and Mother’s plans were about to come into fruition.

I knew Mother had already died once, considering the lap of memories I experienced while fighting Mrs. Mind. Something that coincidentally allowed us to beat her and exploit the cracks with the littlest time allowed to us.

Light’s voice had a hard edge. “I am really going to kill her.”

I met his eyes. Up close, they were a weather of lightning and something unstable.

“Do you really want to do that?” I asked. “I don’t understand her use to you, but I understand her significance. You lose her, and you lose the conduit you’ve been living off and whatever fucked-up chance you think you have at elevating your powers. Now that Mrs. Mind is out of the picture, you can no longer share in her foresight. Here’s the rub… the Mother you have there… is she past, present, or future? You’ve owned her for longer than you think; you should know how her states work. If you kill her now, which ‘her’ are you killing? If you kill her past, she’d just loop for a few seconds to when I just killed Mrs. Mind. If you kill the present, she’ll regenerate into a new body. And if you kill the future… You don’t get a do-over. You’re not clumsy with that math, Light. Don’t pretend you are.”

His breath was shallow. The storm around him hummed like a massed choir. He looked uncertain. He took a step down, then another. The electricity that usually sashayed and prowled his skin cooled into something tight and deliberate. He dropped to one knee beside her, boot digging into the soil, and leaned close enough that his voice was no more than a rasp against her ear.

“You really didn’t think I would kill you?” he whispered, more statement than question.

The woman—Mother? Missive?—twitching under the grit, curled a cracked smile that did not fit the damage her body had sustained. Blood smeared the corner of her lips where the fracture had cut. She said nothing grand, no philosophic squall. She just smiled, small and confident and tired, and met his glare with a look that had survived a library of futures.

“No,” she breathed. “You wouldn’t. I know you wouldn’t.”

John’s voice cut through the charged air. “What’s your deal with the SRC?”

Light turned slowly, amusement in his posture like a cat who’d found a new mouse. “Curious, aren’t you?” His tone was casual, like he was explaining a hobby. “I told them about the future… some things, and some other things. Eventually, we made a deal.” He glanced at John, eyes narrowing playfully. “If you know what’s good for you, back off. Hmmm… John, right? Oh—shit. Mourner’s son, isn’t it? Or grandson? Family trees are messy. Would’ve been nice to talk this out under less… explosive circumstances.”

That was the first time I was hearing this. Mourner. John didn’t flinch; he only tightened his jaw.

Light kept talking while the storm in his skin hummed. “The SRC loves their science. They’ll unblinkingly sacrifice a handful for a plan that saves millions. I sympathize with that sort of cold arithmetic. So I’m thinking of joining them for real, this time.” He shrugged like he was having a casual conversation with us. “With future knowledge and a little leverage, a director’s chair would have been easy. But no… vanity, ego, whatever you want to call it. I wanted to build something real. The best superhero band the world’s ever seen.”

I fired the handgun I’d taken from a corpse with nullifier rounds meant to gut capes and fry power links. The bullets seared through the air and phased through him clean as breath. They landed in the empty air behind him.

I tossed the pistol at him in a last petty gesture. It passed through his chest like smoke.

“Worth the try,” Light said with a shrug, unbothered, as he turned to Mother. “You know, you might be useful after some… education. Re-educating a little girl takes time. I need someone to fiddle with biology… someone like Dr. Sequence to complete you, and that would take some time. So, yeah, I guess I have to find a way to tame you.”

“Fuck off,” said Mother.

Something cold and selfish tightened in me. I asked because curiosity had the bad habit of climbing out of my chest at the worst times. “In the future… what was I like?”

He cocked his head. “Why the sudden curiosity?”

“If you can see the future, why not tell me mine?” I said. “The deal I had with Mother was that if I helped her, she’d show me my future. Now that she’s here, I’m asking you. Tell me what I am. Or what I’ve become. From how you sound, it seemed you knew me from the future…”

He laughed, a sound that started like a twitch and became a small storm. The laugh struck through me like a gust, and I felt it in my bones: not just noise, but a disturbance. My Empathy flared; his amusement bared something raw and terrible underneath, a pleasure in folding other people into inevitability.

“You’re a sorry existence, Eclipse,” he said between chuckles, each syllable a hammer. “You’ve known nothing but pain. Your future? Bleak as it gets.” The laugh softened into a sneer as he stepped closer, the air stiffening with static.

I felt the laugh tug at me, pry into the fragile armor of my thoughts. It bothered me more than it should have, and I knew from the blur in my own chest that my face must have shown it.

Light’s expression hardened. He reached down and touched Mother’s shoulder as if testing a live wire. Electricity spilled off his fingers like steam. He raised his palm and let the current plunge through her body.

It was clinical, the way he did it. There was no theatrics. Just the efficient application of force. Flesh bubbled where the arcs met skin; a smell like seared cloth and meat filled the courtyard. She convulsed, her regeneration stuttering against the raw overload. My hands went numb with the sight, but I couldn’t look away.

When he stopped, she lay like a charred husk, voice gone, breath stuttering into stillness. The smoke rose in a thin ribbon.

It seemed… my question triggered him for some reason…

Light stepped back, eyes flat as storm-slick glass. “I don’t care for this world anymore,” he said, almost conversationally, as if mentioning the weather. “If it’s going to be my training ground for some apocalypse that’s too stupid to be prevented any other way… let it burn. I’ll make sure it ends with a bang.”

He smiled then, a small, terrible smile that promised only destruction.