The sight of Ingram and Carter down echoed around in my head, pushing me onward, forcing me past my own fears.My blood raced, sweat beading at the back of my neck and creeping down my spine.
I’d beensoangry with them, but seeing them like this, witnessing them unmoving, unsure if they were alive or not, the thought of not hearing them again, clawed deep inside me.I didn’t care how much I disliked them at times, how frustrated they made me.None of it mattered as I thought about them not getting back up.
Not seeing Carter making his stupid jokes, not having Ingram making filthy comments, not to have Kenyon just being dumb in general, or Shear freaking me out… That suddenly struck me as unacceptable.
I had survived what a corrupted could do.I was stronger than most people knew, than he knew.
So when his fingers wrapped around my throat, when my air closed off, I tapped into my own past.I recalled that horrible, clawing sensation from before and opened that gate.
Where the corruption had been forced into me before, where I’d dealt with howhehad poured it into me, this time I created that link on my side.
Corruption flowed into me, the same strange way it always did, though the corruption was far more wild.It was feral, scratching and burning and tearing as it filled me.
Corrupted werenotespers at the end of the day.They were different, something between esper and monster, consumed by that twisted, dark energy.They gave themselves over it, couldn’t survive without it, their bodies so entwined with it that my forcing it from themhurt.
He tried to move away, but I wasn’t done.I wrapped my fingers around his wrist, a mirror of how he’d grabbed me, and held on even as he panicked, desperate to withdraw.Even still, I pulled the corruption from him, every speck of it rushing from him to me, my head dizzy, my thoughts sluggish.
It overwhelmed me, but I didn’t stop.If anything, I pulled more, opened myself more.The black on his face, the purple of his eyes, they both receded, dimming.
He yanked harder, stumbling until he tripped backward, taking me down with him.I fell on top of him, but still kept my grasp on his wrist, refusing to let him escape.If he did, he’d recover, he’d come back worse.I couldn’t let that happen, not after what he’d already done to Carter and Ingram.
He stared up at me, his eyes wide, his lips parted in something between horror and amazement.I didn’t stop, though, even when the corruption thinned to a trickle, when it was nearly gone from his body, when it filled me until I feared I might split apart from the pressure.
“How?”he asked, his voice weaker.Of course, animals fought the hardest when they knew they’d nearly lost, when things were the most impossible.Sure enough, he swung, hitting me hard enough to send me flying and skidding across the floor, the air forced from my lungs at the impact.
Even as my body screamed, I twisted, trying to keep him in sight.The past mixed with the present, so much worse than it ever had been before, probably because of the corruption my body struggled to filter through.I saw this man, but overlaid on that I saw the other, my own nightmare.
The man came toward me, steps uneven, feet catching on the floor when he couldn’t even fully lift them.It went to show just how much I’d taken from him.
I couldn’t lift myself, the horrors playing in my head from my past, my body here but my mind trapped in the dungeon from so many years ago, at the mercy of another corrupted.
Before the man came more than a few steps, darkness surrounded him.At first I thought I was losing consciousness, that the visual disturbance was nothing more than my brain giving out, but something familiar about it comforted me.As quickly as the dark mist consumed him, it coalesced into a figure.
Ingram.He appeared just behind the man, blood on his face, fury in those depthless eyes, not a speck of mercy or kindness in them.He lifted his hand, grasped the man by the chin and yanked.A sickening crack came first, but it wasn’t all.Ingram gripped the front of the now limp man’s throat, his fingers curling in before he ripped his throat out as though unwilling to take the slightest chance of a repeat.
Blood spread from the man, pooling on the floor, his body dropped like trash, and it only added to the heaviness inside me.With the threat gone, my mind lost its ability to hold onto the present at all, and I lost myself to the memories, the horrors.
Chapter Fifty
Kenyon
Yun hadn’t woken.The Guild had shown up, taken care of the mess.The corrupted was dead.
Not just sort of dead, not just barely having passed, but fully and completely gone.Even my skills couldn’t have saved him, not with what Ingram did to him.
“How is she?”Carter walked in, though he didn’t walk well.I’d healed him as well, but that wouldn’t stop all the aches from the injuries he’d sustained.
“Healed, but she hasn’t woken.”
Shear sat in the corner of the hotel room, silent as he’d been since the Guild had come, since we had somehow survived this entire mess.He was always quiet, but this felt suffocating.
“How much do they know?”I asked.
“The cameras told them everything, even if we hadn’t.They know she took down a corrupted who handed two S-Rank espers our asses, that she somehow stripped nearly every atom of corruption from him.”
“They aren’t going to fucking let this go.”Ingram strolled in not so much as limping.Then again, he’d gotten thrown around a lot less, and he was so prideful that he wouldn’t limp if he could avoid it.“Should have fucking hidden it.”
“Not enough time.I don’t like it either, but we’re going to have to deal with this.”Carter sighed and dropped himself into one of the chairs in the room.Just doing that went to show how bad he still felt.“The Guild is going to want to get their claws into her.”
