Ren Young Ming's Story

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New Eden City | Government Holding Facility "Death Row" | 3 pm

The boy was at his knees, the first time in years. An egotistic grin was on his face, eyes covered by the hood on his head. A pickup truck with a large wooden pole was carrying him through the camp, with about a dozen of heavily armed guards at the front and back. His arms were tied tightly to the pole, binded by a rope. He was bluffing: he knew he was going to die, and he hoped that his siblings were still alive at this point. It was extremely hard to believe, especially because he was brought in. He saw a soldier eating bread under a small tent: he looked bored, forgotten like the crowds of men in the camp. The prisoner boy smirked, like he was about to wreak havoc on this poor man. "You having fun?" The soldier looked up at the boy, and the truck stopped, and they started to prepare to execute the boy. "Hehe, I'm just starting to have a little fun of my own. Watch you bread, though." The soldier was perplexed.

It appeared that he was kneeling on a wooden platform with wheels and a handle. He was carried off, hands still tied to the sturdy pole. As the boy was rolled away, a scream was heard minutes later. The soldier's bread had appeared to have slimy maggots crawling out of it, and the soldier saw that the bread started to crumble at his hands. It turned into a mass of maggots, and they started crawling all over him. "Ahh.. AAAAAAH!" he screamed as he felt maggots crawling into his uniform pants. They were crawling through his buttons, and through the Corporal badge. "Get them off... GET THEM OFF NOW!!" he screamed as he started swatting and curling up in agony. To him, it felt like slimy tendrils were caressing his body. He let out one last shriek before he dropped to the ground, heart pulsing at full speed. Cardiac arrest? Heart attack? It didn't matter to Ren Young Ming. He had to pull off his biggest show before he died: he promised himself he would die happy.

But to the others, they didn't seem perturbed. To them, they just saw a soldier lying under his tent, taking a nap. No maggots, not shrieking soldier. Yes. It was all the boy. I guess you could call him the master of illusion.

---

Silence had befallen the calm before the storm, and nobody dared anymore venture into the dark if they valued their lives. A thick eerie fog had set in the heart of New Eden, so no one could make out the ungodly bloodshed occurring in one of its alleys. Blood painted its streets and splattered its walls, and what remained of the lifeless carcass that it once belonged to found itself slumped onto the ground – with its head neatly displaced nearby. “Fucking disgrace against your own kind.” What came next was enough to send chills down the spine of any ordinary person as he dug his fingers into the man’s skull; the excruciating sound of mutilating flesh as he removed its right eye. “An eye for an eye.”

“Bastard.” Spitting on its corpse and taking up his sword, he became a mere silhouette in the enveloping darkness that continued to writhe its way through the city. Slowly the skies began to grow dark and the streets ran cold, the silence broken by thunderous applause overhead before the rains came. Still clutched in his palm was the slimy sphere he had taken from the mage; but he wasn’t any ordinary mage. He was a dog of the government who sold out his own kind for a few pieces of silver and a warm bed. The only use he would ever serve was giving his assailant access to one of the most heavily fortified lockups in the city.

If there was a hell, this prison was it; inside was every unimaginable horror ever committed to anyone who ever called themselves a mage. Torture, genocide, and worst of all traitors. But soon enough they would all be taught a lesson to know what fear truly tastes like. Raising his arm and smirking in the distance, he closed his eye, and with a wave of his hand you would think he was maestro to Beethoven’s 9th as lightning violently struck the control tower. Screams echoed in the courtyard as chaos ensued, all the while the maestro stayed true to his ballad of death.

When the guards finally took notice it was already too late as he had made his move, slaughtering the men as if they were sheep. “Too slow.” Coming up on his last victim, he grinned as he drove his sword through the man’s back, bursting through his sternum as a spew of blood poured out just as he removed his blade. Alarms triggered, calls for backup could be heard screamed over the intercom. Using the eye he had procured earlier, he overrode the retina scanner to gain access to the inside – and was welcomed graciously to a firing squad on the other side. “For me... ? You shouldn't have!"

“Belial…”