Several Years in the past. At [Redacted].

  A scarlet mist of boiled blood churned over the battlefield, obscuring the sun and plunging the world into a monochrome nightmare of mauve shadows and darting blurs. The handkerchief tied over Wade's mouth did little to keep the smell of raw meat at bay, and sweat stung his storm-cloud-colored eyes. He blinked it away, knowing the red-pink drips would dye the creases of his face for days to come.For some reason, the image of himself dyed pink set off a bought of insane mirth. There was every reason in the world to not ugh, to not draw attention, but this ughter was not a thing of reason or prudence. All he could do was press his back harder against the driftwood tree, hands cmped over his mouth, and spasm with poorly restrained ughter as shrieks, keens, and metallic crashes echoed in the mist.Something boomed, like fireworks shot too low. He crouched as far down as he could, wishing he was short enough to hide all of him behind the washed-up tree trunk.He was neither small nor particurly rge. Only 'big-ish'. At least when compared with other humans. Whether he would stand in the front or back row in pictures was a coin toss, but he was always asked to help move furniture. Likely because he was built broad enough that, regardless of his height, he looked like someone who should be big. Though he always disappointed on closer inspection. He had once had boring, sandy brown hair. Now, his head was buzzed to near baldness. His face was decent, but 'symmetric' was the best compliment he had ever gotten in school. Which was probably fair. He knew that he was neither the smart nor the pretty sibling. Accepting the fact did not stop him from thinking it was a load of crap, though. There were only two of them. He should have at least been the best at something.Instead, he was good at practicing things his sister mastered easily, and he was good at doing the hard things. It was an inherited gift. Though he looked like his father—and the resembnce hurt him anew every time he saw a mirror—he had gotten two traits from his mother. One was grey eyes, and the other was a bone-deep knowledge that he would not always be the smartest, or best looking, or funniest person in a room, but he could always, always choose to be the hardest working.That was not doing him much good now.To be fair, being the pretty sibling in a killing field wouldn't be particurly helpful either. But he did wish he was smart enough to do something other than flinch and grind his butt deeper into the sand of the beach.His freshly issued long sword shook in my hands, red light glinting off the unscarred surface. His stress-ughing faded into wheezing, and he took a moment to pull out his compass. The needle jerked one direction, spun in a frantic circle, and then completely reversed its motion to point at a new angle.Seemed like someone was using earth magic.Wade put the compass away and slumped against the tree trunk, his visibility shrinking as a particurly thick bank of ionized blood rolled in. He had gotten separated, and who knew how long luck could keep him unnoticed in a pce like this.A massive explosion shook the beach, and something heavy hit the ground near him. With a flinch, the young man skittered across the sand. He came to his feet, holding the sword high, and spotted movement in the fog.Figures moving from the direction of the explosion became slowly clearer until, right at the edge of visibility, the twisted shadows resolved themselves into silhouettes. They were tall, gangly, with pincered hands and limbs just a bit too thin to hold their weight.Wade's hands clenched until the tip of his sword was visibly shaking.Reflexively, a thought came to him that managed to circumvent his terror. His old sensei would smack him for such an over-tight grip. His very first teacher—the one who had insisted on being called 'sensei' even though he taught a mongrel mix of fighting styles from all over the United States—had been a real stickler for details like grip.For some reason, the image of that old man in his starched judo gi berating him brought a measure of comfort.The fear was still there, but it was not the only thing now. Space had been made for him to think of something other than how terrified he was and how hard it felt to take a full breath.The second his mind had room again, he realized something: the time for waiting and hoping was over. It was time to fight or die. Which was an easy pick, all things considered.Wade took a calming breath, ignored the awful brine-blood taste of the mist, and loosened his shoulders like I had been taught to do by that first sensei. He sunk lower into his stance, taking a moment to check his surroundings and ensure the tree trunk was best positioned to guard his fnk without tripping him if he had to retreat.He was not a praying kind of guy, but he did send a thought out to his Mom. 'I'm sorry,' he thought, 'I love you. Please don't be mad at me. I had to do this, or it all would have been meaningless.'Then, jaw clenched, he prepared to draw cws or a thick pelt from his alternate form. The second he shifted, they would sense him and swarm, but if he could put up a fight, then he might draw the attention of someone who could save him.Another massive explosion came. This one was so loud that the red mist visibly moved with its force. Each little droplet of blood shuddered as the sound passed. Wade didn't flinch this time, but he did feel his stomach sink. It would be impossible to make enough noise to be heard over that. The real magic he could do took months and months of preparation, and his abilities with enhancement were mediocre. Which meant he would fight until he was desperate enough to either use his third form—the hidden, cursed one—or choose to die with his sanity.Hands steady but heart throbbing, he pictured the shape he wanted to switch into. Just before he drew magic to summon up his second form, a new scent reached him through the damp air.It smelled like magic, and a very specific magic at that. It was dry like dust, moldering cloth, stale air, and talcum powder, but somehow more. The scent was cold, blue, and ced with misty grey.There was no mistaking; it was his magic. Thresher. The Godkiller.Wade paused, poised on the edge of shifting, his eyes locked on the long-legged shapes lumbering through the mists. Should he turn his back on them when he didn't know their speed or if they would give chase?The problem was that it was not a choice of fight or die anymore. Now, it was fear or hope. Not an easy decision to make when you could only see the fear and might never reach the hopeThen, for just a second, the smell of magic flickered and left him utterly alone with the beasts. That single moment of terror was all it took. He turned and ran towards the renewed smell.Sand shifted under his feet and ate away the energy of already exhausted legs. Chittering screams came from behind him. He redoubled his speed, leaping obstacles, stumbling, and nearly impaling himself on the sword. Still, Wade pushed harder.The mauve-tinted haze shifted on a subtle breeze, and the young man began noticing lifeless bodies dotting the path. He ignored them, only paying enough attention to avoid tripping. He didn't, couldn't, let himself stop to note how many were human versus beast.The smell of dusty, cold magic got stronger, but so did the sounds of pursuit. Following his nose, Wade veered towards a massive rise slowly revealing itself at the borders of the red mist. As soon as he reached its edge, he jumped, pnted a foot against a jagged-rocky protrusion, and leaped with every ounce of magic he could push into his legs.Enhancing was not his strong suit—even less than shifting—but he still sailed up more than double his own height before his chest smmed into the point where the sheer surface began curving onto something horizontal.His fingers scrabbled, reinforced gloves doing him no favors. But, with more enhancement magic, he could haul himself up over the edge."Ahh, Wade," said a bck silhouette further up the rise. "I'm gd that you found your way back in one piece.""CRYTPOS! BEHIND M–"?  A nightmare mixture of a scarecrow and a crab flew up from the swirling crimson banks of fog next to his head. It was tall and gangly with a red and white shell. Tufts of something moldy and jagged grew in patched across its smooth carapace.Its face was a mass of so many armored ptes and moving spider-leg-like pieces that it was almost impossible to piece together in his head. It shrieked its hunger. He screamed his terror and tried to bring the sword's point between them. But Wade knew he wouldn't be in time. In slow motion, he saw the monster's leap finally crest, its legs stagger on the smooth shingle-like surface below them. Stumbling or not, it cocked back its pincer, intent on batting away his sword and falling on him to finish the chase.Before the deep-sea abomination's swipe connected, a lung-shaking wave of force came from behind him. The spindly crypto stopped dead. A pulse vibrated down Wade's body and resonated in his chest like he was standing right next to the industrial amps at a rock concert. But rather than being buffeted and buzzed, the wave of pressure moved over him in a slow crawl. The crypto was not so lucky.Over the course of one or two seconds, its shell flexed and cracked as the wave visibly passed through it. Viscous purple goo burst from multifaceted eyes, and clear fluid sprayed from the joints of its shell. When the pulse had finally passed all the way across its body and met in the back, the crypto was unched into the mist like it had been hit with the world's rgest baseball bat.The fog around the two humans fell abruptly silent.?  "Hmm, yes, there were cryptos," said the man who smelled like crypt dust, cold blue power, and magic. "Thank you for the warning."?  On the ground below them, he could hear a rain of bodies hitting the sand and skipping like stones on the water as the pulse went through the horde that had been chasing him. The standard issue long sword wavered in the air before falling to the young man's side. He stared, mouth open, at the empty space the monster had just occupied.? As he gaped, the shadowy figure padded over and crouched next to him.At the approach of such power, Wade felt his eyes begin to ache and his nose burn. He couldn't have described the man's height, build, or scent if he tried. Between each blink, the head-to-toe bck clothes shifted, hinting at a body type slightly different from what he had just seen. Above the befuddling clothes was nothing but a ft white expanse of a porcein mask with no mouth and a broken infinity symbol drawn in marker over the left eye."Wade?" came the man's fatherly voice."Yes, sir?""I promised that I'd show you what you were signing up for. This," he said, gesturing to the red-cast nightmare reeking of raw flesh and sea salt, "Is my world. You would be a part of making days like this happen. An important part that is not always as safe and protected as you have been today. It's not too te for you to walk away."The man—the legend—crouched next to him as battle cries and death keens wafted in from the red-shrouded distance.Wade blinked. 'It's not too te to walk away,' the man had said. But those words meant something completely different to Wade. They brought his father to mind.Rage, recrimination, and a bleak, endless pain of mourning rose up in him.He looked back to the spot in the air where the crypto had been hovering and then toward the ground where its body had gone. To where he had run past human bodies. Those people had also confronted the choice between fear and hope. But they had only found fear, not an impossible-to-describe man ready to sy the evil and casually begin conversations about the future. All while they waited in the bloody center of sughter so violent the very air had been stained red.A sughter of monsters who would have done far worse had they gotten past them and into a city."I'll get stronger?" Wade croaked."Yes."'Just walk away,' snarled someone in his memory. But it was not spoken by one voice; instead, it was uttered as a chorus. From hundreds of memories and recollections, he heard that phrase intoned with wry humor, rage-stricken growls, or fatherly support.Just walk away. ?  Wade dropped his head and felt his nails rasp against the river stone smoothness he was sitting on. As if finally realizing he was safe, his hands began to shake again. He couldn't say if it was caused by rage, sadness, terror, or disgust.Then again, it didn't really matter. There was only one answer to any of those feelings.He was done with walking away."Count me in, Sir."The bck-cd figure's mask stayed locked on Wade for several long seconds before nodding. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have asked you that, not here," the voice said, warm but solemn. "Someone will talk it through with you when it's calmer. Still, there's no time to dally. Let's move out before biohazard gets here to take care of this. Also, you can call me Thresher. Horrible code name, but better than nothing."With that, Godkiller, the legend himself, turned his back and walked to the edge before jumping out into the mists.Wade scrambled to my feet and went to the edge, terrified of being lost and alone again. A bank of mist rolled in. The fall was steep, and he couldn't see the ground through the haze of blood.But who the hell even cared anymore. Today seemed to be a day for blindly jumping into the abyss.Wade sat down, put his legs over the edge, and let himself fall without looking back.It was not terrifying, nor was it serene. Just resigned. The young man grabbed a massive eyesh as he fell and slid down it like a rope. Even so, the fall was tall enough that the sand exploded from around his feet when he made his awkward nding.Godkiller was a few steps away and already moving into the mists. He stopped and looked back. Not wanting to make him wait or to draw the attention of the crab-looking parasites that came in with the real threat, Wade ran. He tried to avoid stepping on the scattered bits of gore and viscera dotting the beach from the man's fight with the gargantuan creature behind them. He jogged around a bus-sized hand and finally reached the man whose magic reeked of crypt air and cold blue winds.Together, they turned their backs to the massive scaled snout they had been standing on and walked until the sight of it disappeared behind a crimson fog made of the monster's own boiled blood.

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