(Cael's POV)
Not even a flinch… nothing! Not a single "wow," not even a helpful critique like "cool, but maybe don't look like a possessed hurricane next time."
He just stared at me.
Seriously.
Like I was some freakish mutation born from a science experiment gone horribly wrong.
"You're messing with me, right? What, cat got your tongue?"
The poor bastard looked like he was in a trance.
Completely bugged out.
"I…" — his eyes shot wide open out of nowhere, and he stepped back.
Almost tripped.
He looked like he'd just come face-to-face with a starving monster.
And look… I was hungry.
Training burns a shitload of calories, bro.
"Me? ME? ME??"
"Wait, damn it!"
I swear, by the look on his face, it was like a first kiss.
That combo of shock, horror, and cheap existentialism — like seeing your first overdue bill with interest. All it needed was a dramatic violin soundtrack in the background.
"This feeling… I wasn't prepared for this…"
"Feeling?"
His lips trembled — halfway between an emotional breakdown and a fart.
Hard to tell.
"This… this intent…"
"Intent?"
Oh, great.
Now this?
This was supposed to be my moment.
That classic scene where your rival or mentor looks at you with teary eyes and says, "You… you're incredible!" Or, if they're more old-school, a simple "Damn, that's some crazy power you got."
But no.
Instead, I got glitched-out silence and an awkward tension that begged for someone to cough in the background just to break the vibe.
"Look…"
"Look?"
The genius, face like he'd just tried to bargain with Satan and came back broken, pointed at me like he was revealing the end of a movie everyone already knew.
"Look around you."
So I looked.
Of course I did.
What if I was floating again or had wings now?
But nope.
There it was.
My aura — or whatever mystical term people use these days — twisting in the air like heavy smoke at some rave full of deranged people.
The kind they throw in BH.
It looked like poison, desperate to escape the bottle.
In this case… I was the bottle.
"…what a trip."
It was pure distortion. Like smoke pouring from a cremation chamber straight to hell. Dozens — no, hundreds — of skulls, with eyes emptier than political promises, spiraling out.
Starving dead.
Each one more desperate than the last, crowding, pushing, fighting for space just to whisper secrets even the devil would be too scared to hear.
First…
Silence.
Nothing.
I felt lucky… or deaf.
The fear hit me like a sip of cold coffee at 3 a.m. — bitter, unexpected, and impossible to spit out.
Straight-up horror movie moment, the kind you watch alone and then sleep with the lights on.
Scared shitless.
I felt a weight in my chest.
Like a punch with no warning.
My hands trembled and my gut twisted, like something inside me had woken up… and it wasn't friendly.
"What the hell…"
And then, I froze.
Everything — body, mind, dignity — full-on blue screen.
"What's wrong, boy?"
He was confused, sure. But didn't take his eyes off me, like any wrong move might set off the spiritual nuke I had apparently become.
And the skulls? Still there.
Moving what little was left of their jawbones — no muscle, no skin, no sense of decorum.
Whispering.
Quiet, but loud enough to slice through the silence.
Like old ladies gossiping.
And they were calling me. Every one of them. Every name that ever scarred me, like I was a manufacturing defect on display.
Cael.
Lord.
Anomaly.
Failure.
Or maybe those were just the names I gave myself — to make the self-loathing sting even worse.
What a fucking mess…
"Are you hearing this?"
I asked, voice already cracking.
I didn't know if I wanted to hear a "yes" or a "no."
So I swallowed hard.
A glimmer of hope, a desperate bet on my sanity.
Was I crazy or not? The doubt cut through my brain like a dull machete.
Baldie — if I can even call him that — just shook his head, slow as hell.
Like someone who's seen it all and is just waiting for the next mess to show up. And in this case, guess who?
Yup. Me.
"What exactly?"
I almost screamed the answer but held it in.
"The whispers…"
He looked at me — not just looked, saw — like someone who knows you're about to lose it but lets you take one more step into the abyss before offering a hand.
What I didn't know… was that the way I saw my aura was completely different from how he saw it.
And for a second, I really thought it was a hallucination, a trick of my own unhinged mind.
I've seen shadows before… when I lived on Earth, you know?
That feeling of spotting something that shouldn't be there.
"…Only you can see the intent behind your own intent. I can only perceive what I think it is… My analysis doesn't go beyond the visual structure. I'm limited to sensing quantitative vibrations. Qualitative ones — when there's expression, an emission — those require perception beyond the obvious!"
He said it like he just handed me the key to the universe — but I didn't have the instruction manual.
Didn't understand shit… Qualitative? Quantitative?
The dude sounded like he walked out of a meeting on productivity metrics.
What the hell, man? I just wanted to know what the fuck was going on.
"Geez…"
Good thing, huh?
Because let's be honest — if life were easy to understand, it'd just be a boring pile of nothing.
"So, what are they… whispering?"
"Death… death… Did I mention death?"
"…creepy."
Seriously? That was your reaction?
Death, man. That's not something you just nod at like "oh, fridge's empty."
"Shit," I muttered without meaning to. "All I hear is doom… names, death, and you're just standing there like that? Still in shock?" — I almost laughed, that same old sarcasm, like none of this was more than a bad joke.
But then… I realized too late where that expression went.
What the fuck was that?
The wall — the wall that looked like it touched the clouds — was… disintegrating?
Like some invisible force was corroding it, bit by bit, tearing a hole that kept growing.
It was like watching a giant structure melt in acid, more devastating by the second.
"What's happening over there? Was that me?"
That's when he noticed too.
He turned, like waking up from a nightmare.
"What did you do…"
Purple flames infested the wall ahead — but didn't burn. No, they weren't ordinary flames.
They slithered like a plague, brushing against matter, devouring whatever they touched.
It was fire with no heat or crackle.
It was the end, painted in colors the world hadn't even named yet.
Poetic as hell… maybe too poetic.
"Me? Ehr… wasn't that my expression? Don't we have spiritual construction workers or something?"
"No…" — almost a tragic whisper, like he'd just lost the lead role in a soap opera.
"You think the boss will be mad?"
"This is terrible! Terrible!" — clutching his head like we were mid-apocalypse. What a scene.
His words fell like bricks, and his face changed instantly — from spectator to chaos inspector of the disaster I had clearly just caused.
"You failed at propagation and immediate perception…" — dramatic music, cue it.
"But the effect…" — he nodded toward the wall, too lazy to point — "it's eating through the barriers. These barriers… seriously?"
Looked like fire on paper.
And there I was, at the epicenter of the latest disaster, surrounded by destruction and more passive-aggressive judgment from Baldie.
"And what's so impressive about that?" I crossed my arms with the attitude of someone just promoted from spiritual liability to elite wrecking ball.
"What, am I wall-level now? Or like a premium demolisher?"
"The problem…" he started with that look — the same my mom used when I botched her coffee with too much sugar — "is that these barriers were made to withstand the war from two thousand years ago. Gods tried to break in… and failed! But you… you…"
He stared at me like people stare at a microwave that turned on by itself — unsure if it's a miracle or a possession warning.
"And you…" — deep breath, instantly regretting my existence — "you're managing to corrode them… without even trying!"
"This is dangerous."
For you.
For everyone!
He clenched his fists like he was holding back a tantrum… or an existential breakdown.
"You're a danger!"
Yeah…
I was.
And I can say, with complete authority:
I royally fucked up.