Black Equation - The Gifted Ones

Number Eleven

A seemingly invisible chain of steel tightened around his body, making what little oxygen he had in his body escape. The Master's voice was deadly quiet this time. "Do I have to repeat myself?"

His vision was blurring. Dark spots popped in and out, dotting his sight and gradually blinding him. He wailed in despair. It hurts! It fucking hurts!

"I take that as a yes."

As soon as the binding force was released, Arashi gasped for much needed sustenance. It took him a while to get his sight back. The tips of his fingers had turned an ugly shade of purple. If he hadn't conceded, the Master could have killed him.

The Master did not move from his seat. The entire time, he gazed at Arashi as if he was a child throwing a tantrum and needed to be taught a lesson by making him feel guilty. It didn't work though. There was no greater fulfillment than killing the son of a bitch who failed to protect the woman they both loved.

The Master turned his attention to the devil himself. "Tell me what happened exactly as it happened."

The former top agent stared at the older man as if his words did not reach him. As if he was cocooned in a shell of his own making. He looked so out of place in the middle of the mess. 

"We were escaping," he said finally. His voice was gripped with a hollowness that Arashi fought to ignore. "We were chased out of the highway. The Light, they were hot on our tails. They shot the wheels. I lost control of the car. We toppled… down the cliff."

"It's very unlike you to make such an elementary mistake," the Master observed. "Didn't you use explosives to shake them off?"

Krad's face was that of a man who had lost all sense of reality. "She didn't know who I was. How else could I react? She refused to trust me. We were fighting in the car. I discovered too late that she… her memory... I am at fault."

The entire universe seemed to shudder at the mention of those words. It was the Master’s Gift at work again, this time coming with a vengeance. The atoms in the air fractured, the humidity reached a nearly inhospitable peak, and everything solid seemed to collapse and deform simultaneously. A sizzling, crackling noise grew louder by the second, filling in the total silence that enveloped the room that all of the sudden was too hostile for those inside.

The Master had Krad's head in his large hand, holding it in a grip that could have deformed a normal man's cranium. His green eyes looked like windows to hell. So gripped in fury they were that they appeared to glow in rage.

"I," he said through clenched teeth, "made you for her. You are nothing without her."

"I am nothing without her,” Krad agreed. He winced as the hold on his head tightened.

“How come you’re here and my daughter isn’t? Why are you alive, and not her?”

“Rael…”

“Then why did you come here? Do you seek salvation through punishment? Do you think dying by my hands will redeem you?”

“I have one last mission to fulfill. I can't die yet.”

"Is that so?" The Master tossed him to the far wall singlehandedly, and the force of it caused all the glassware in 01’s room to shatter. Krad’s body crumpled like it was made of rags. Blood oozed from the cuts made by the broken glass underneath him.  "Explain."

Using his elbows, Krad attempted to rise. His cold blue eyes shone in contrast to the blood. "I will fulfill the Mistress' last wish. That will be my last service for Creed. Until then I cannot die."

“There. All patched up.”