In the Dead of the Night || Winter Soldier

Prologue

The streets were empty. It was dark by then. A figure stood in the headlights not too far off, melding into the darkness encompassing him like he was a part of it, or commanded it. He held something obscure in his hands; like an RPG but with a disk shaped end to it. I wasn't given much time to ponder the absurdity of it all before he fired it under my car, and my entire world turned into a tumbling human sized washing machine of metal and pain.

"W-Wait," I meekly urged, and momentarily adjusted my cracked, thick rimmed, square glasses. "Think about this for a second. You can't hit a woman with glasses. That's like, breaking two rules at once. Oh! And never hit a man – or woman – when they're down. So that's actually three rules –"

His next strike cut me off, and I narrowly missed that limb of mass destruction creating a crater in my face, which instead easily conceived a crater in the concrete below like it was cracked sand. That could have been my face ohmygod.

Spluttering up metallic tasting blood, I dragged my stiff and rigid body from the upturned car, glass prickling and nearly shredding my forearms until they were decorated in a sickly crimson colour. Blurred boots progressively stalked towards me, and with every last effort I could muster in that moment, I inelegantly and staggeringly sprinted into the car park across the road.

Blood seeped through my busted lip, and all I could taste was the bitter iron of its aftertaste. A bullet found its home in my left calf, and with it, a strangled scream that could be mistaken for an animal spurted past my bloodied lips.

Relying on my last resort, I tore my glasses off with a newfound vigour, and sharply stared back at the assassin to notice a few wisps of transparent people who watched our brutal, devastating exchange with palpable amounts of concern. I always did prefer the company of the dead more than the living – they understood me more. Talked with me more. That could be because I'm an anti-social, slightly pessimistic, socially awkward, ridiculously clumsy hermit, but let's not dwell on my less than fine qualities.

The assassin lurched forward for another – presumably his final – blow, yet upon the fleeting glance I spared at three deceased surrounding our aggressive altercation, the brunette man found himself held back by an imperceptible force. Fighting something you can't see is the equivalent to fighting blind. Unfortunately, the dead aren't as strong as any being present in the physical world, and were quickly torn through by the man with a metal arm.

Bad timing, but I wonder – if I threw fridge magnets at his arm, would they stick?

Probably.

Will have to try that next time he tries to kill me.

He advanced towards me in no time, long legs eating up the few meters of pavement I had managed to put between us. Yet on the last couple feet before reaching me, I threw my hand up and exerted my palm in a way that made it look like I was loosely gripping the air, and he immediately felt the impact of it, jarringly stopping in his tracks. For it wasn't the air I gripped.

It was his soul.

Soul manipulation is no small task, it is as draining for the subject as it is for the caster; hence why I left it as the absolute last expedient. I know what it feels like to have your soul toyed with, which is why I avoid practicing it when I can. It's your life essence, your spiritual force. Even with the very light grip that I held over it, the man immediately stopped everything he was doing.

It's primarily felt in your chest and breath, but extends to all regions in the human body. You can feel the hand of the Necromancer close around you, like being man handled by an invisible giant.

That's quite basically what he felt, but what I felt was an entirely different experience.

Like an Empath, I felt every sliver and abundance of joy, pain, anguish, ire, brokenness, love, purity, impurity and everything in between. I felt as well as saw the cracks in his psyche and soul, how the man was monstrously tore apart and rebuilt like he was a toy and not a human being. Real memories poorly replaced by fake ones, like scribbled handwriting in pencil over neat handwriting in pen. Whenever the pencil faded or was erased, they re-wrote it sloppily again.